The Loved Ones — Mary-Beth Hughes

The nationally bestselling Hughes returns with a darkly brilliant "Mad Men"-esque drama of family secrets and professional lies reminiscent of Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road" and James Salter's "Light Years."

From the outside in, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father Nick is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy.

As Nick's older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cut-throat world of cosmetics, the Devlin family are further fragmented by betrayals and victims of the cruelest kind of hurt.

In "The Loved Ones," Hughes takes her gimlet eye deep into the secret places between men and women to give an incisive portrayal of one family's struggle to stay together against stacked odds of deception, adultery, and loss. Years in the making, this is Hughes' astonishing and compulsively listenable breakout, a sweepingly cinematic novel of relationships defined by an era of glamour and decadence.