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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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WHAT COULD BE SAVED
When Laura Preston was very small, her brother Phillip vanished, leaving her glamorous parents shattered by the loss. Forty years later, a man claiming to be Phillip appears. Can something as broken as Laura's family be saved? This spellbinding novel explores the indelible bonds of siblings and the ways we are forever defined by the experiences of childhood.
Washington, DC, 2018: Laura Prescott is a reclusive artist who finds herself frequently at odds with her older sister Bea, especially as they are coping with their mother's slow slide into dementia. Laura feels like a traitor for preferring this newly docile, forgetful woman to the chilly, perfectionist socialite who raised her. When a stranger contacts Laura claiming to be her brother, Philip, who disappeared forty years earlier when the family lived in Bangkok, Laura ignores Bea's warnings of a scam and flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. But meeting him in person leads to more questions than answers.
Bangkok, 1972: Genevieve and Robert Prescott live in a beautiful home behind a high wall, raising their three children with the help of a half-dozen Thai servants. In these exotic surroundings, the children are driven to ballet and riding classes, Genvieve gives lavish dinner parties for her husband's colleagues at the architecture firm where he works, rigorously maintaining the impeccable social standards of her class. But in truth, Robert works for the CIA, Genvieve finds herself drawn into a passionate affair with her husband's boss, and the Prescott's serene household is vulnerable to the unseen dangers of a rapidly changing world where the rules they play by no longer apply.
As the novel cuts back and forth between the present and the past, we learn what happened to Philip the day he went missing, see the repercussions of those events forty years later, and discover the truth about the man claiming to be Laura and Bea's brother. Perfectly capturing the telling details of everyday life across four decades, What Could Be Saved is an unforgettable novel about a family shattered by loss and betrayal, but given an unexpected chance at restoration.
Liese O'Halloran Schwarz grew up in Washington, DC after an early childhood overseas. She went to Harvard and then attended medical school at University of Virginia. While in medical school, she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Prize and also published her first novel, Near Canaan. She specialized in emergency medicine. Her second novel, The Possible World, was published in 2018. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Bangkok, 1972: Genevieve and Robert Prescott live in a beautiful home behind a high wall, raising their three children with the help of a half-dozen Thai servants. In these exotic surroundings, the children are driven to ballet and riding classes, Genvieve gives lavish dinner parties for her husband's colleagues at the architecture firm where he works, rigorously maintaining the impeccable social standards of her class. But in truth, Robert works for the CIA, Genvieve finds herself drawn into a passionate affair with her husband's boss, and the Prescott's serene household is vulnerable to the unseen dangers of a rapidly changing world where the rules they play by no longer apply.
As the novel cuts back and forth between the present and the past, we learn what happened to Philip the day he went missing, see the repercussions of those events forty years later, and discover the truth about the man claiming to be Laura and Bea's brother. Perfectly capturing the telling details of everyday life across four decades, What Could Be Saved is an unforgettable novel about a family shattered by loss and betrayal, but given an unexpected chance at restoration.
Liese O'Halloran Schwarz grew up in Washington, DC after an early childhood overseas. She went to Harvard and then attended medical school at University of Virginia. While in medical school, she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Prize and also published her first novel, Near Canaan. She specialized in emergency medicine. Her second novel, The Possible World, was published in 2018. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Published 2021-01-12 |