The Old Romantic

By Dean, Louise

Publishers Summary:
A long-estranged family discovers that blood is thicker than water in this hilarious and moving domestic comedy. It's been a couple of decades since Nick cast off his impossible, contentious, embarrassingly working-class parents: gruff, stingy, explosive Ken and June, who seemed to revert to a primal state of nature after a divorce that both of them managed to blame on Nick. Enjoying the life of the country gentleman that he's made for himself with impeccably turned-out Astrid and her teenage daughter, Laura, Nick has kept only the slenderest family connection to his brother, Dave, who's stuck with the role of ambassador in a family that's long settled into cold war. But then Ken decides that the year of his death has arrived, and thus kicks off an ill-conceived quest to reunite his family before he meets his fate. Bringing to this tinderbox just the spark it needs, Louise Dean sends up the whole clan, each of them fatally flawed yet saved by hidden grace, and illuminates with her incomparable acuity their clashes of generation, gender, class, and temperament, in a riotous and compassionate conflagration.

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ISBN
978-1-59448-779-8
Publisher
Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA)


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on December 1, 2010

After a long estrangement from his family, Nick, a Hastings solicitor, is invited by his brother to a dinner reunion with their eightysomething father, Ken. Growing up the favored son, whose charm and good grades helped get him into Cambridge, Nick left home at 18 and turned his back on the family. For his part, Ken, a gruff old codger, long divorced from his first wife, Pearl, and recently ...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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