"Right after the Weather"--from author Carol Anshaw--eloquent, moving, and beautifully observed--filled with flawed, sympathetic, and uncannily familiar characters

Right After the Weather

The author of the “graceful and compassionate” (People) New York Times bestseller Carry the One presents a new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test, and in its aftermath, find themselves in a newly uncertain world.

It’s the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago’s theater community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it’s time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she’s haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent marriage, is currently camped out in Cate’s spare bedroom, in thrall to online conspiracy theories, and she’s not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale, a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate’s model for what serious adulthood looks like.

Only a few blocks away, but in a parallel universe we find Nathan and Irene—casual sociopaths, drug addicts, and small-time criminals. Their world and Cate’s intersect the day she comes into Neale’s kitchen to find these strangers assaulting her friend. Forced to take fast, spontaneous action, Cate does something she’s never even considered. She now also knows the violence she is capable of, as does everyone else in her life, and overnight, their world has changed. Anshaw’s flawed, sympathetic, and uncannily familiar characters grapple with their altered relationships and identities against the backdrop of the new Trump presidency and a country waking to a different understanding of itself. Eloquent, moving, and beautifully observed, Right after the Weather is the work of a master of exquisite prose and a wry and compassionate student of the human condition writing at the height of her considerable powers. 

Reviews

 

“Right after the Weather is about the terrifying discoveries we make—about ourselves, about the world—when the membrane separating civilization from barbarity is torn. Carol Anshaw has a genius for rendering life on the page, for characters and situations as ferociously complicated as reality. She is a master.” Author: Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“Carol Anshaw is one of the best storytellers we have. She sees all the outside and all the inside—of this difficult time we live in, of these complicated, puzzling, heart-stopping lives we lead. No one can put down an Anshaw novel and we are lucky, especially now, to have this one arrive.” Author: Amy Bloom, author of White Houses

"I love the way Carol Anshaw looks at the world, her eye for people and the strangeness of the everyday. Right After the Weather is a beautiful study in light and dark contrasts, the lives of the blessed and the lives of the bleak, in the vein of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters."  Author: Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
“Anshaw crafts an engaging narrative with her customary precision and tart humor. Another treat from the great Anshaw: sharply observed, unsentimentally compassionate, always cognizant of life's complexities.” Source: Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"The Carry the One author is adept at finding compassion in dire circumstances, a skill she brandishes with brilliance in Right After the Weather." Source: O, the Oprah Magazine 


 

Carry the One

“When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”
 
Following a devastating moment in the hours after Carmen’s wedding, three siblings and their friends move through the next twenty-five years under its long shadow. Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another, and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect. Whether they take refuge in art, drugs, social justice, or love, Carol Anshaw’s characters are sympathetic, funny, and uncannily familiar as they reflect back to us our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding. 



Carol Anshaw

 

Carol Anshaw is an American novelist and short story writer. Her books include Carry the One, Lucky in the Corner, Seven Moves and Aquamarine. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories in 1994, 1998, and 2012. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts (1992). She has won a National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, an NEA Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Carl Sandburg Award and Society of Midland Authors Award. Her newest novel, Right after the Weather, is forthcoming in October from Simon & Schuster.

Anshaw is also a painter. She divides her time between Chicago and Amsterdam 

http://carolanshaw.wordpress.com