The Unfolding | Granta

  • Published: 06/07/2023
  • ISBN: 9781783785353
  • Granta Books
  • 416 pages

The Unfolding

A.M. Homes

The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family, and must take responsibility for his past actions. Closely guarded secrets surface when his wife Charlotte stops self-medicating to numb her emotions. And when eighteen-year-old Meghan votes for the first time, she awakens to the dissonance between her father’s expectations and her own dreams for the future.

In a story as much about the dynamics of a family as the desire for power, A.M. Homes unpacks a dangerous rift in American identity, where words mean different things to different people, prompting a reconsideration of the definition of truth and freedom. Dark, funny and terrifyingly prescient, The Unfolding explores the implosion of the American dream and how we arrived in today’s divided world.

I am a devoted Homes fan: her books are sometimes shocking, always beguiling

Maggie O'Farrell, US Elle

The best book she's published: for her to get into the shoes of its main character was a remarkable act of sympathetic imagination

Bret Easton Ellis, Observer

A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifyingly close to the unfunny truth

Salman Rushdie

The Author

A. M. Homes is the author of the novels,This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers and Jack, and three collections of short stories, Days of Awe, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects and the highly acclaimed memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, as well as the travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes frequently on arts and culture for numerous magazines and newspapers. She lives in New York City.

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Days of Awe

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Read the title story from AM Homes' dazzling new collection of short stories, Days of Awe, available now from Granta Books.

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The File: Lost Then Found

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‘Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments, like shrapnel, that push to the surface without warning.’