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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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THE HUMANITY PROJECT

Jean Thompson

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel already being hailed as an “instantly addictive...tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (Booklist)

After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn’t quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art’s neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund. Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Fosters’ handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: his father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers. As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?

Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society.

Available products
Book Published 2013-04-01 by Blue Rider
Book Published 2013-04-01 by Blue Rider

Comments

Thompson infuses her characters’ bizarre, terrifying, and instructive misadventures with hilarity and profundity…

A penetrating vision of a lower-middle-class family sinking fast....Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid but of a piece [and] caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages. A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.

A bracing narrative stance and a tart political viewpoint....Thompson is eerily good at inhabiting a wide range of perspectives and has a fine ear for the way young people speak to one another.... a novel that doesn’t pretend to have any answers, comfortable or otherwise, but that vividly, insistently poses questions we should be asking. Suzanne Berne

A forthright piece of social criticism...Thompson is also an accomplished story writer...attuned to the callousness of 21st-century society, its comedic elements, its misguided efforts to right itself, its often tragic results....There’s real beauty in the way Thompson has characters serve one another, even if that loving service is often not enough. It is, however, deeply human. Helen Schulman