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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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THE SUN COLLECTIVE

Charles Baxter

From National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune)a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears.
Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places: churches, storefronts, benches, and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader that will alter both of their lives.

Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who's convinced he's found direction.

As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in suburban, middle-class Minneapolis.

A send-up of modern American society and the specters of its consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and violence that punctuate our daily lives.
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Published 2020-11-17 by Pantheon

Comments

The prose throughout is graceful, the writing perceptive, resonant, and deeply sympathetic . . . An exceptional work.

Hints are dropped, but Baxter seems content not knowing all the answers, or maybe believing that motivations are no easier to fully comprehend than instances of everyday magic. His gift is to tune us into the beauty and the strangeness that walks among us ...

There is an eerie sense of urgency to this novel. It's timely, highlighting autocratic tendencies and the increasing grasp of Capitalism while suspending us in Baxter's "tomorrow-plus-today." Read more...

Only the supremely talented Charles Baxter could write a novel that combines blistering social critique with humor, mysticism, passion, and grief. The Sun Collective speaks directly to the unsettled time in which we live. The characters in this brilliant, beautiful, and deeply insightful book will live on in your imagination for years.

I've been reading, with intense and escalating admiration, Charles Baxter's novels and stories and essays for decades, but nothing quite prepared me for the radical brilliance of The Sun Collective.

Book Award finalist for The Feast of Lovemasterfully captures the zeitgeist of our country as we navigate multiple crises, some he could never have predicted. This is truly a compelling book for our times.

What a spectacular book this is. A parable for our ominous times, it has revolution, murder, young love, magic, and marital squabbling in its pagesa novel of ideas in sly and modest Baxter form. Quite amazing.

What to do with all of this anxiety? That question hangs over Charles Baxter's tense, wry and ultimately touching new novel, "The Sun Collective," which vividly recreates the oscillating sense of dread familiar to anyone who hasn't spent the last four years in a coma ...

A strange and wonderful novel! It begins in comic realism, then becomes dream-like and spooky, mixing the mundane and the fantastic. Imagine an American Murakami, wildly inventive yet full of real emotions and recognizable human beings. This is Charles Baxter's best novel since The Feast of Love, with a subtle political bite that is original and timely.

Engrossing . . . A thoughtful study of anger, grief, and hope.