The Altruists
  • Published:
    Mar-2019 (Hardcover)
    Mar-2020 (Paperback)
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook / Audio
  • Main Genre:
    Literary
  • Time Period:
    Contemporary
  • Pages:
    336
  • Rating:
  • Purchase:
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A vibrant and perceptive novel about a father's plot to win back his children's inheritance

Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him. And then there's the money--the small fortune his late wife Francine kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children.

Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate; and Maggie, a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a noble life of self-imposed poverty. On the verge of losing the family home, Arthur invites his children back to St. Louis under the guise of a reconciliation. But in doing so, he unwittingly unleashes a Pandora's box of age-old resentments and long-buried memories--memories that orbit Francine, the matriarch whose life may hold the key to keeping them together.

Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St. Louis, and a small desert outpost in Zimbabwe, THE ALTRUISTS is a darkly funny (and ultimately tender) family saga in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, with shades of Philip Roth and Zadie Smith. It's a novel about money, privilege, politics, campus culture, dating, talk therapy, rural sanitation, infidelity, kink, the American beer industry, and what it means to be a "good person."
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EDITIONS
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    •  
    • Mar-2020
    • Penguin
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 0525522735
    • ISBN13: 9780525522737
    •  
    • Aug-2020
    • Vintage
    • Paperback
    • ISBN: 1784707546
    • ISBN13: 9781784707545
    • First Edition
    • Mar-2019
    • Viking
    • Hardcover
    • ISBN: 0525522719
    • ISBN13: 9780525522713
    •  
    • Mar-2019
    • Penguin
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 0525522727
    • ISBN13: 9780525522720
    •  
    • Mar-2019
    • Vintage
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 1473549795
    • ISBN13: 9781473549791
    •  
    • Sep-2019
    • Thorndike Pr
    • Hardcover
    • ISBN: 1432867989
    • ISBN13: 9781432867980
    • Large Print
    • Library Binding



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