THE LOVED ONES

THE NATIONALLY BESTSELLING Hughes returns with a darkly brilliant Mad Men-esque drama of family
secrets and professional lies reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road and James Salter's
Light Years.

From the outside in, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father, Nick, is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy. As Nick's older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cut-throat world of cosmetics, the Devlin family are further fragmented by betrayals, and become victims of the cruelest kind of hurt. In The Loved Ones Hughes takes her gimlet eye deep into the secret laces between men and women to give an incisive portrayal of one family's struggle to stay together against stacked odds of deception, adultery, and loss. Years in the making, this is Hughes's astonishing and compulsively readable break out, a sweepingly cinematic novel of relationships defined by an era of glamour and decadence. Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling novel, Wavemaker II, a New York Times Notable Book and the acclaimed collection Double Happiness which earned Hughes a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, NY. Praise for Mary-Beth Hughes's THE LOVED ONES “A book about leavetaking is inevitably a book about returning. In Mary-Beth Hughes's new novel, departures of all kinds—by air, by ocean, by illness, by alienation, by death—lead the characters to circle one another as though in an entranced dance, looking for a safe place of arrival, hoping, perhaps, that their losses would feel less unbearable there. Hughes is a master of understatement, and deftly captures the subtle undercurrent of family life and the danger from the ever-changing world in the 1970s.”—Yiyun Li “In Mary-Beth Hughes's electric novel The Loved Ones sexual currents surge as a bruised but glamorous couple strive to go on ‘making life gorgeous' after the death of their young son. Underhanded transactions and self-serving characters threaten these ambitions, and the privileged life in New York and London, late sixties, is not without its costs. Hughes writes with stunning economy: fully realized characters are made with a stroke in this most seductive, irresistible fiction.”—Christine Schutt Praise for Mary-Beth Hughes's National Bestseller WAVEMAKER II “A writer of dexterity and imagination.”—The New York Times Book Review “A novella that reads like an epic: part prison story, hospital-ward drama, family tragedy and historical flight of fancy [An] enigmatic and challenging debut.”—Los Angeles Times “[Wavemaker II] is, in all senses of the word, a composed work of fiction elegantly constructed.” —The Washington Post