Swell A Novel [Paperback]

Thirty years afterFrom Rockaway( A great first novel --Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.

When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family--Sue, Dan, and their two daughters--a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too.Andthe house is haunted.
On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim--formerly Timmy (seeFrom Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic--who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.
The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.Jill Eisenstadt is the author of the novelsFrom RockawayandKiss Out. Her writing has appeared in theNew York Times,Vogue,Elle,Boston Review,New York Magazine, andBOMB. She lives in Brooklyn.
Eisenstadt's detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidatedoceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman's cast-offtchotchkes....In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling withthe aftershocks of 9/11--memorials, uncertainty, death, and a newlife--the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no oneunaffected.
Publishers Weekly
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