Read: & Sons

I’ve just finished & Sons by David Gilbert and know it’s a book I will be thinking about for months to come. This book has been likened to a “Catcher in the Rye” for the next generation. It is masterfully written and impossible to put down. Gilbert writes with such spectacular description that you find yourself feeling like you are living within the pages opposed to just reading along with this fast-paced story about multi-generations of privileged people growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It explores topics as complex as parental love, addiction, infidelity, and aging, yet the author so seamlessly weaves these topics into one story about the lives of an aging author at the end of his career, his sons who are each facing their own demons, and the friends he kept for decades through good and bad times. We enter into the story in the fall in NYC and are transported between the city and the campus of a high-brow New England boarding school campus. It feels like a perfect read for this time of year…