Allegra Goodman Books In Order

Paradise Park

Brilliant, fresh, funny, and wise, Allegra Goodman has delighted readers with her short stories in The New Yorker and her critically acclaimed collections Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz. Her celebrated first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, was a national bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. The novel, wrote Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, ‘ratifies the achievement of the author’s short stories, even as it announces the debut of a gifted novelist.’ Now, in Paradise Park, Goodman introduces one of the most endearing, exasperating, and indomitable hero*ines in modern literature: Sharon Spiegelman. Abandoned by her folk dancing partner, Gary, in a Honolulu hotel room, Sharon realizes she could return to Boston and her estranged family or listen to that little voice inside herself. The voice that asks: ‘How come Gary got to pursue his causes, while all I got to pursue was him?’ Thus, with an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions a guitar, two Indian gauze skirts, a macram bikini, and her grandfather’s silver watch Sharon begins her own spiritual quest: living with the red footed boobies, embracing the Edenic rain forests of Molokai, seeking enlightenment with and without men at the Greater Love Salvation Church, the Consciousness Meditation Center, a couples workshop in Waikiki, the Torah Or Institute in Jerusalem, and in Professor Friedell’s University of Hawaii course on world religions. Ever the optimist, Sharon is sure each time that she has struck it rich ‘spiritually speaking’ until she comes up empty. Then, in a karmic convergence of events, Sharon starts on the path home to Judaism. Still, even as she embraces her tradition, Sharon’s irrepressible self tugs at her sleeve. Especially when she meets Mikhail, falls truly in love at last, and discovers what even she could not imagine her destiny.

The Family Markowitz

‘The Family Markowitz is one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life to have come our way in quite a while.’ Linda Matchan, Boston Globe

In The Family Markowitz, Allegra Goodman writes with wit and compassion of three generations of Markowitzes making their way in America. At the center is Rose, the cantankerous matriarch, who longs for her earlier life in London and Vienna but is now forced into dependency on her sons Ed, an academic expert on terrorism ahead of his time!, and Henry, an artistic expatriate with a taste for antiques and postmodern poetry. Also in the family circle are Sarah, Ed’s wife, who teaches creative writing and longs for a more literary life, and Sarah and Ed’s daughter Miriam, a medical student who causes great alarm in her largely assimilated family by rediscovering Judaism.

Through her sharp eyed observations of weddings, hospital vigils, holiday dinners, and other rituals of family life, Goodman writes about the Markowitzes from the inside, bringing each character to life.

Kaaterskill Falls

In the summer of ’76, the Shulmans and the Melishes migrate to Kaaterskill, the tiny town in upstate New York where Orthodox Jews and Yankee year rounders live side by side from June through August. Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. She needs a project of her own, outside her family and her cloistered community. Across the street, Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters, bound to him by their loss and wrenching escape from the Holocaust. Both comforted and crippled by his sisters’ love, Andras cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his children and his own beautiful wife. At the top of the hill, Rav Kirshner is coming to the end of his life, and he struggles to decide which of his sons should succeed him: the pious but stolid Isaiah, or the brilliant but worldly Jeremy. Behind the scenes, alarmed as his beloved Kaaterskill is overdeveloped by Michael King, the local real estate broker, Judge Miles Taylor keeps an old secret in check, biding his time…
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Intuition

Hailed as ‘a writer of uncommon clarity’ by the New Yorker, National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman has dazzled readers with her acclaimed works of fiction, including such beloved bestsellers as The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. Now she returns with a bracing new novel, at once an intricate mystery and a rich human drama set in the high-stakes atmosphere of a prestigious research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sandy Glass, a charismatic publicity-seeking oncologist, and Marion Mendelssohn, a pure, exacting scientist, are codirectors of a lab at the Philpott Institute dedicated to cancer research and desperately in need of a grant. Both mentors and supervisors of their young postdoctoral proteges, Glass and Mendelssohn demand dedication and obedience in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, a young postdoc in a rut, begin to work, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectations. But Cliff’s rigorous colleague-and girlfriend-Robin Decker suspects the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it.

With extraordinary insight, Allegra Goodman brilliantly explores the intricate mixture of workplace intrigue, scientific ardor, and the moral consequences of a rush to judgment. She has written an unforgettable novel.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Other Side of the Island

From New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman comes a post apocalyptic novel about love, loss, and the power of human choice. Honor and her parents have been reassigned to live on Island 365 in the Tranquil Sea. Life is peaceful there the color of the sky is regulated by Earth Mother, a corporation that controls New Weather, and it almost never rains. Everyone fits into their rightful and predictable place…
. Except Honor. She doesn t fit in, but then she meets Helix, a boy with a big heart and a keen sense for the world around them. Slowly, Honor and Helix begin to uncover a terrible truth about life on the Island: Sooner or later, those who are unpredictable disappear…
and they don t ever come back.

The Cookbook Collector

Heralded as a modern day Jane Austen by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment. Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty eight year old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty three year old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess s boyfriends, not so much as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way. Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can t find what we re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

Total Immersion

In ‘The Succession,’ the members of a prosperous Hawaii synagogue agree on almost nothing. But when the president of the synagogue absconds with a small fortune, far deeper and more troubling rifts emerge…
In ‘The Closet,’ Evelyn’s sister flees her family to take up residence in the attic while the shunned Evelyn finds herself slipping into the waters of her sister’s soul…
. In ‘Wish List,’ an expert on terrorism, vacationing at an academic retreat in England,receives a late night phone call from National Public Radio. Asked for commentary on a hostage situation of which he is ignorant, Ed can whisper only: ‘It’s unspeakable.’Total ImmersionIn these and other exquisite stories, Allegra Goodman fills rooms with laughter and voices, captures dinner parties, seaside picnics, academic grudges, shul politics, and the kind of hurts that only families and lovers can know. Featuring two new stories previously published in The New Yorker, Total Immersion is Allegra Goodman’s first collection of short fiction a masterful work from one of the most powerful and eloquent voices on the American literary landscape.’Goodman is brilliant at capturing the clutter of both interior and exterior life.’ Los Angeles Times’Allegra Goodman is a remarkably gifted young writer, with a penchant for getting swiftly to the truth of things.’ Chaim Potok