Mona Simpson's first two novels, Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father, won her literary renown and a wide following. Now, in her third novel, the narrator Ann Atassi has been replaced by a third-person narrator recounting the adventures of young Jane di Natali, but the theme remains the same: the search for, and the attempt to understand, the absent father.

This time the father is a millionaire biotechnology magnate named Tom Owens. Into Owens's charmed life comes Jane, born out of wedlock, raised in communes, and now dispatched into his care by a mother who is no longer capable of providing it; Tom is far from ready for this responsibility. Fans of Simpson's previous novels will not be disappointed by this excursion into the cracked world of family relations.

"Simpson is an attentive observer and a fluent stylist, but it is the element of subtle surprise that draws us through these pages, the magnetism of an original mind that holds us fast."
--Booklist

Author: Mona Simpson
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 10/15/1997
Series: Vintage Contemporaries
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.1lbs
Size: 8.58h x 5.55w x 1.04d
ISBN: 9780679772712


Review Citation(s):
New York Times 12/21/1997 pg. 24
Publishers Weekly 09/08/1997
People Weekly 10/24/2011 pg. 63

About the Author
Mona Simpson is the author of Casebook, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, recently, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Simpson is on the faculty at UCLA and also teaches at Bard College.