Good Company - by Kate Christensen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the brilliant Kate Christensen, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for The Great Man, comes a compelling, searing, funny novel about women, sex, power, and self-reckoning.

Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn't know it yet.

The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia's alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She's been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is.

Interweaving excerpts from Julia's memoir with her encounters with important people from her past--the woman she was in love with in college, her old New York mentor, her male editor, her literary nemesis, a former graduate student--Good Company examines what it really means to be "good company" as Julia faces her demons and comes to terms with what she really wants from sex, life, and work.

Review Quotes

"A deeply endearing story about confronting one's past and constructing a new future--under extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I've read all year." - Washington Post on Welcome Home, Stranger
"Kate Christensen's new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?" - Richard Russo, author of Somebody's Fool, on Welcome Home, Stranger
"To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensen's superb new novel Welcome Home, Stranger, a triumph of intelligence and wit (which will surprise none of her many fans). The prodigal here is a brilliant journalist grieving the loss of a very difficult mother while attempting peace with those she left behind: a resentful sister and an ex-lover who can be neither trusted nor forgotten. A spellbinding book from one of our best chroniclers of the very American struggle to strive for excellence while still living in community with others." - Ann Packer, author of The Children's Crusade, on Welcome Home, Stranger
"A fantastic study in loss--the grief kind and the yearning too, oh my god the yearning! Plus menopause. Plus Portland, Maine. I loved it." - Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things, on Welcome Home, Stranger
"Our shelves could use more women like Rachel and Sam as a counterpoint to men in midlife who've dominated fiction for decades. . . . It's exhilarating to read an uninhibited female character who is rife with contradictions. . . . Christensen also does a skillful job of animating difficult family relationships while avoiding a conventional arc of forgiveness. . . . In the end, it is surprising to see where Rachel meets herself." - New York Times on Welcome Home, Stranger