Bug Hollow - by Michelle Huneven (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details and superb gift for description . . . Huneven remains a compassionate guide through the secrets and lies, betrayals and chance encounters, losses and disappointments that buffet this broken and remade family over time." --Helen Schulman, New York Times Book Review

Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and Oprah Daily

A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after one event changes their lives forever

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother, Ellis, went missing the summer he graduated from high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture of the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis's girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high-achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.

Michelle Huneven is "known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good" (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.

Review Quotes

"This book is beyond. I couldn't stop reading. Insightful and tender, the story of a beautiful, broken and quirky family who feel utterly real. I didn't want it to end." --Ericka Waller, author of Goodbye Birdie Greenwing

"Bug Hollow is wonderful. A moving portrait of an imperfect American family, this novel is a world I got lost in. I enjoyed it hugely." --Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things

"A wonderful novel. I enjoyed it so much." --Polly Samson, author of A Theatre for Dreamers

"Michelle Huneven's sixth novel, Bug Hollow, instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details (those pay phones!) and superb gift for description -- of a sprawling cast led by a supportive engineer father, Phil, and a prickly elementary-school teacher mother, Sibyl; and especially of California's many wildly differing landscapes...The novel evolves from its innocent opening into something more intriguing... the five-decade international saga that unfolds in 10 discrete but interwoven chapters, each narrated by a different member of the Samuelson family or its widening circle. Formally, the result is something like a narrative love child of Alice Munro's novelistic short stories and Elizabeth Strout's novels of interconnected short stories... Huneven is exceptionally generous with all of her characters -- even the hard-to-bear Sibyl -- and remains a compassionate guide through the secrets and lies, betrayals and chance encounters, losses and disappointments that buffet this broken and remade family over time." --Helen Schulman, New York Times Book Review

"Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . begins with a perfectly calibrated bit of domestic comedy set during a golden summer in the mid-1970s . . . Huneven knows just how to seduce us with this family's adventures . . . With extraordinary candor and tenderness, Huneven shuffles through those raw months when hope feels like a cheat as the Samuelsons are unmade and remade by tragedy . . . Huneven dares us to get comfortable only to yank us years or thousands of miles away. The family that initially felt so shiny and self-contained gives way to individual stories that butt up against one another at skewed angles. It's not confusing; it's eye-opening. The very structure of Bug Hollow reminds us that the smoothly progressive chapters of most novels are a fanciful creation of some chiropractic narrator who's artificially aligned the disorder of actual lives. Here, the Samuelsons' fates play out in ways that feel preposterous and completely believable . . . such graceful compression. Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Spellbinding . . . empathetic and propulsive." --Boston Globe

"Huneven does modern family like no one else." --Marion Winik, Oprah Daily

"Not another novel about family dysfunction, secrets and lies. Rather, Huneven's bighearted family is bound together by the power of love, and doing right by each other. In that way, Bug Hollow is of a piece with Huneven's previous work, in which seemingly incompatible characters reach out across social and cultural divides in a bid to grasp some measure of redemption and comity . . . taut and compressed." --Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times

"One of those gorgeous, sprawling family sagas I'm always desperately seeking (especially in the summer--nothing goes better with sand and sun than loving, multigenerational messiness). It's also one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in a long time . . . It's a novel that is hopeful without a trace of treacly fluff. Huneven has a knack for economical characterization--she makes more than a dozen points of view equally compelling and tender, with the expert deployment of the sulfurous smell of a hot spring, a marriage being saved by Dominoes. A thoroughly beautiful book." --Jessie Gaynor, LitHub

"Engaging and supremely satisfying . . . This is a novel to cherish, and Huneven a writer to deeply admire for her humanity and her grace." --BookPage (starred review)

"This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is . . . Readers of Elizabeth Strout or Mary Gaitskill will love this book. Huneven hits it out of the ballpark again." --Library Journal (starred review)

"A gift: top-drawer fiction and a family story that speaks of the joys, sorrows, and surprising possibilities of human connection . . . Serendipitous meetings invite redos, showing the beauty of life's circular nature. Readers will be charmed by a sense of nostalgia and interdependence that speaks to the best in humanity. Fans of Anne Tyler will enjoy Huneven's strong sense of place, quirky menagerie of characters, and the intriguing, relevant issues the Samuelson family navigates through chapters of their life together." --Booklist (starred review)

"Huneven is good at unlikable characters, making them fully three-dimensional while stopping far short of sappy redemption . . . A deeply satisfying novel; Huneven's best work to date." --Kirkus (starred review)

"Michelle Huneven gets under the skin and into the heart. Reading her is like calling your best friend for a long overdue catch up--confiding, clever and with the rush of connection that lucid, fine-tuned prose creates. Pages fly with phrasing so right it feels like you were born knowing it, and peopled with characters more real than seems possible. Michelle Huneven is sister in the blood to Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler and Tessa Hadley. If this is her sixth novel, I am in for the rest please." --Raffaella Barker, author of From a Distance

"Phil and Sibyl Samuelson and their three children are at the center of this deeply satisfying novel, but Huneven's leaps through time and stories provide constant surprise and delights. The reader finds herself in the leafy green of California, then Saudi Arabia for a business trip, then by the side of an old woman who has unexpectedly fallen in love. We go into the cul-de-sacs of these characters' lives, experiencing moments they might not write down in their own biographies, but which shape them forever. Reading the novel feels like watching a master painter at work: color is laid down, forms emerge, and then at the end your breath is taken away, because it has all come together." --Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

"Michelle Huneven's wondrous and intimate journey of the Samuelson family embedded me with their deepest secrets, greatest loves, epic heartbreaks, and a grief that touched them all for generations. Huneven's piercing observations of moments big and small left me feeling not just their witness, but more a distant relative emotionally invested in their outcome. I'm going to carry the Samuelsons in my heart for a very long time." --Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club

"Bug Hollow crackles with compassion and propulsion, offering the layered and propulsive pleasures of the long view--the evolving fortunes and dynamics of a family across decades--without ever surrendering the texture of their days or the pulse of their trippy hearts, their capacity to surprise themselves and us. I inhaled this book in a weekend, grateful to feel it simmering and swirling inside me, regretting only that it would ever end. Michelle Huneven is a treasure, and Bug Hollow gives us the song of her sentences and the glorious telescope of her attention with a whittled, nimble intensity that took my breath away." --Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

"Michelle Huneven is such an elegant, watchful writer, and she has immense love and compassion for her characters. This is a novel that lays bare the tenderness of the world, exploring its breadth and smallness at once. I adored it." --Claire Lombardo, author of Same as it Ever Was

"Bug Hollow is a deeply immersive novel about a middle class, Californian family, with its closely held secrets, loves and tragedy. With the breadth of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles and the intimate ironic pleasures of Barbara Pym, Huneven spans the American century and at the center is a mysterious woman; brilliant, mean, held back by her time, harsh, and beloved. I couldn't put it down." --Mona Simpson, author of Commitment

About the Author

Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, and Search. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her master's in fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.