Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

LOVE LIKE THIS

Cynthia Newberry Martin

A Novel

For the first time in a lifetime, Angelina and Will can choose again. After twenty-two years with children at home, she has no idea what she wants and is counting on the empty house to figure it out.

But he already knows-he wants her, all to himself.

Nine days into their child-free life, he quits his job and announces he's home to stay. So Angelina announces she's returning to nursing, this time in home health care.

In his new basement workroom, Will enjoys making boxes, but the quiet house sends him in search of music, where he meets Stella who reveals more than the magic of iPods.

Meanwhile, Angelina's first patient is an unpredictable woman named Lucy who reveals a particular magic of her own, as does her billboard-painting son John Milton. As Angelina and Will's life together becomes increasingly tense and their days apart become increasingly comfortable, it looks like Will may be the one to get the empty house.

Love Like This drops you inside a long-term marriage, where you'll be screaming either stay or go-as you weigh the value of sticking with the familiar versus the value of venturing into the unknown.

Cynthia Newberry Martin's first novel, Tidal Flats, won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Fiction. Her website features the How We Spend Our Days series, over a decade of essays by writers on their lives. She grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a little house by the water. Her third novel, The Art of Her Life, will be published in June of 2023

Available products
Book Published 2023-04-01 by Vine Leaves Press

Comments

Intimate and compelling, Love Like This renders the subterranean longings of women and men in midlife and midstream-at the end of one way of being and at the beginning of the next. This complex and insightful story-about marriage, parenting, friendship, and rediscovering parts of yourself you thought were lost-lingers in the imagination long after you've read the last page.

Cynthia Newberry Martin has written a well-crafted and sensitive story about the perils of assuming how things are going to be rather than talking them through. Angelina and Will are relatable people whose lives are changing in their middle age, but my heart was stolen by Lucy and her son John Milton, characters whose lives are unusual and compelling.

So isolated by wealth, beauty, and family, her husband's house rules and her mother's agoraphobia, Angelina arrives at middle age believing only the rich know about poetry. Intimate, brutal and compelling, this beautifully-paced novel is her Buddha's journey down from the hilltop and into the world of women, the poor and the unbeautiful, who will teach her compassion, courage, open-mindedness and maybe a little self-love.

Love Like This is an astonishment. The novel comes on like a quiet exploration of the empty nest syndrome, but quickly deepens into an exploration of female identity, desire, and the utter unpredictability of love. Cynthia Newberry Martin's prose is confident, precise, and, when required, as bold as a billboard. The story she's crafted shocked and delighted me.

Brilliantly conveys the complexities of love and marriage. Her protagonist, Angelina, is torn between her love for her husband Will and her desire, now that they are empty nesters, to be alone and free to discover who she truly is and what she wants from her life. Martin masterfully depicts both the positive and negative aspects of Angelina's conflicting desires, and as a result even the smallest, most ordinary events in Angelina's life are packed with powerful drama. At one point a character tells her 'The world is full of wonder.' So is this book.