"ThisBeautiful Life is a gripping, potent and blisteringly well-written story offamily, dilemma, and consequence. . . . I read this book with white-knuckledurgency, and I finished it in tears. Helen Schulman is an absolutely brilliantnovelist." —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love 
Theevents of a single night shatter one family’s sense of security and identity inthis provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, theacclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In thetradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller, and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts abrilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploringour most deeply-held convictions and revealing the enduring strengths thatemerge in the face of crisis.

This Beautiful Life: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Schulman, Helen

Dramas & Plays

Harper

This Beautiful Life

Harper-perennial

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, A New York Post Best Book of the Week
Recommended by Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Skimm, The BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep
“Mind-blowingly brilliant…. Provocative, profound and yes, a little unsettling, Come With Me is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a family, and though it has hints of sci-fi, it’s so beautifully grounded in reality that it seems to breathe. Although it takes place over just three days, what’s so fascinating is that so many lives, and many possibilities, are lived through it. Truly, it’s a novel like its own multiverse.” — San Francisco Chronicle
From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.
"What do you want to know?"
Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.
Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?
Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.
Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

Come with Me: A Novel

COME W/ME

Perennial

A debut collection of short stories from a writer whose work has appeared in the leading small magazines, stories that focus on surprising characters who maintain vibrancy in the face of sometimes appalling odds

Not A Free Show

KNOPF

Out of Time

Contemporary

Random House Value Publishing

The marriage of Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf is already in trouble when tragedy strikes on the morning of September 11, 2001. Though they escape harm when the planes crash into the towers, husband and wife are suddenly cast into an unpredictable psychological space that allows their repressed selves, and their sharp differences, to rise to the surface. With their young son and nanny in tow, they head for the safety of the Hamptons. But despite their soft landing in this cocoon of privilege, the unleashed demons will push them to their psychic limits -- so much so that by the next morning they will hardly recognize each other. Taking place over a manic twenty-four hours, A Day at the Beach is a fast-paced, razor-sharp story whose personal tragedy contains sparks of dark humor about American life pre- and post-9/11. Helen Schulman has crafted a powerful portrait of a marriage in crisis, framed by one of the darkest events in our country’s history.

A Day at the Beach

United States

Mariner Books

Lucky Dogs: A novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Vintage

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course.\n"Part thriller, part Hollywood satire, Lucky Dogs is a brash, sometimes heartbreaking saga in which trauma and self-preservation converge across decades and continents. This is Helen Schulman's best novel yet."—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House\nOn a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet in line at an ice cream kiosk on the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors—one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong.\nIn a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women—no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface—whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal, and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?

In a novel that is part love story, part black comedy, and part searing family tragedy, Dr. David Hershleder, a brilliant but tortured Jewish neurologist on the cusp of turning forty, is thrown out of the house by his shiksa wife. He still loves her and his children, but an essential something, the piece of him that should know how to share his heart, is dead. In order to avoid the crushing weight of his loss, he embarks on a research project involving a Holocaust denier. The son of a refugee--a mother whose psychic wounds cast a paralyzing spell over her child's life--Hershleder has a growing fascination with Holocaust denial that makes perverse sense. He becomes more and more obsessed and, with the help of two oddball buddies from college, he finds and confronts a revisionist in Paris, and in the process confronts himself, exploding the lies he has constructed his own life around--his own revisionist history. Helen Schulman deftly explores both the frightening world of Holocaust denial as well as the more intimate denial that we often use to survive our own lives. With humor and incisive intelligence, The Revisionist examines the dangerous absurdities embraced by the Holocaust's would-be refuters, as well as the havoc the Holocaust still wreaks on the children of Holocaust survivors, a grief that is learned, not earned; a grief that is inherited.

The Revisionist

Crown

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