Some characters are just too good to let go after a single book: Olive Kitteridge, Hercule Poirot, Tom Sawyer. And now, in Wreck, Catherine Newman has given Rocky, the sharp-witted, neurotically doting mother who narrates her delicious 2024 novel, Sandwich , a repeat engagement.

When we first met her in Sandwich , Rocky was thrilled to have her husband, grown children, and aging parents all together under one roof during the family's annual vacation on Cape Cod. But squeezed between generations and moodily menopausal, she was feeling the weight of both past secrets and future change.

Wreck is even funnier, yet also more earnest in its explorations of life's fundamental impermanence. It picks up the story of Rocky and her brood two years later, back home in western Massachusett

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