Father of the Rain - by Lily King (Paperback)

About the Book

From the award-winning author of "The English Teacher" comes her most ambitious novel yet. King sets her sharply insightful family drama in an upper-middle-class suburb, where she traces a complex and explosive father-daughter relationship from the 1970s to the present day.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times Editors' Choice, Lily King's masterful third novel received glowing critical praise upon its initial publication and is poised to make an even bigger splash in paperback.

Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who's beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents' conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner's basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.

As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father's fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own life-until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she's found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago.

Review Quotes

--Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction
--Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
--New York Times Editors' Choice
--O Magazine and Marie Claire Summer Reading pick
--Amazon.com Best Book of the Month

"Father of the Rain is a big, powerful punch of a novel, a gripping epic about a father and daughter that plumbs the dark side of a family riven by addiction and mental illness. . . . There's something so raw and affecting about Daley's love for her damaged father that the book will linger in your mind long after you've finished it."--Entertainment Weekly (A)

"Marilynne Robinson's Home and Roxana Robinson's Cost are the most exquisite recent [literary] examples . . . of what living with an addict must be like. . . . Now Lily King's Father of the Rain is a worthy companion on this theme. Surprising and wise . . . by a writer who understands the horrible burden of trying to save someone who's ruining your life. . . . A brilliant exploration of the attraction of martyrdom, the intoxication of playing savior. . . . King poses the questions so powerfully that you can't answer them easily: What kind of abuse finally abrogates one's responsibility to a self-destructive parent? What is too much to ask of a child? . . . An absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line."--Washington Post

"Spellbinding . . . Marvelous . . . A story of high drama in the court of Nixon-era New England aristocracy . . . King brilliantly captures the gravitational pull of the past and the way it can eclipse the promise of the present. . . . You won't be able to stop reading this book, but when you do finally finish the last delicious page and look up, you will see families in a clearer and more forgiving way."--Vanity Fair

"Luminous . . . Uplifting . . . Fresh, with vividly drawn characters . . . and a clear eye for the details of their singularly messed-up relationships."--O, the Oprah Magazine

"King infuses soul into this tale of a family torn apart by abuse."--Marie Claire (Summer Reads)

"King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together . . . [and] demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn't always end."--Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review

"You know that moment when the ingenue in the horror movie heads downstairs to check the radiator, and you're screaming, dumbfounded, at the screen? That's the sort of protective rage you feel for Daley Amory, the narrator of Lily King's novel Father of the Rain. . . . Haunting, incisive . . . King is brilliant when writing from the eyes of a tween, all self-conscious curiosity but bright and hopeful as a starry sky. And as Daley grows up and learns how to trust and to love in spite of herself, King cuts a fine, fluid line to the melancholy truth: Even when we're grown and on our own--wives, mothers, CEOs--we still long to be someone's daughter. The dream of an absent ideal father is like a thick, soft blanket; find one to burrow under, and enjoy."--Elle

"[An] excellent novel . . . Sensitive and perceptive . . . King gives us the messy complexities of family without tidying them up or providing neat morals. . . . The moving final pages depict a reconciliation all the more realistic because no one dramatically repents or forgives; they simply acknowledge bonds that can't be broken. . . . [Father of the Rain] may be Ki

About the Author

LILY KING is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including Euphoria, Writers & Lovers, and Heart the Lover, as well as the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in Portland, Maine.