"Sixteen-year-old Sarah Kunitz lives in a posh, suburban world of 1970 Boston. From the outside, her parents' lifestyle appears enviable - a world defined by cocktail parties, expensive cars, and live-in maids to care for their children - but inside their five-bedroom house, all is not well for the Kunitz family. Coming home from school, Sarah finds her well-dressed, pill-popping mother lying disheveled on their living room couch. At night, to escape their parents' arguments, Sarah and her oldest brother, Peter, find solace in music, while her two younger brothers retreat to their rooms and imaginary lives. Any vestige of decorum and stability drains away when tragedy hits one terrible winter day. Soon after, their father, a self-absorbed, bombastic professor begins an affair with a younger colleague. Sarah, aggrieved, dives into two summer romances that lead to unforeseen consequences. In a story that will make you laugh and cry, Night Swim shows how a family, bound by heartache, learns to love again."
Jessica Keener's fiction has been recognized in The Pushcart Prize under "Outstanding Writers," and won Redbook magazine's second prize. Her debut novel, Night Swim, has been widely praised by reviewers and book bloggers including The New York Times, which called Night Swim "an earnest debut" and "moving." The Boston Globe said "Keener perfectly captures a certain kind of 1970s adolescence," and Booklist said "this memorable debut will strike a universal chord with readers." Her work has appeared in scores of national publications and literary magazines, most recently in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Huffington Post and The Nervous Breakdown. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant and was a finalist in Breadloaf's Bakeless novel competition.
Look for her new collection of stories, Women In Bed, forthcoming Oct. 1, 2013.
For more than a dozen years, Keener's feature articles have appeared in The Boston Globe; O, The Oprah Magazine, Coastal Living, Design New England. She co-authored Time to Make the Donuts with William Rosenberg, founder of the worldwide coffee and donut franchise.
Night Swim hit #9 in Amazon's Paid Kindle Bestseller list.
