by Siri Hustvedt

Henry Holt & Company / Macmillan
www.henryholt.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7908-1
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7908-4
$25.00 Hardcover
Fiction

MBA Bookseller Information

Order from your Macmillan rep or through wholesalers.

Backlist titles:
WHAT I LOVED, Picador trade paperback, $14.00, 978-0-312-42119-9, 0-312-42119-2
THE BLINDFOLD, Picador trade paperback, $14.00, 978-0-312-42275-2, 0-312-42275-X
THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILI DAHL, Holt trade paperback, $12.00 978-0-8050-5590-0, 0-8050-5590-8
A PLEA FOR EROS: Essays, Picador trade paperback, $15.00, 978-0-312-42553-1, 0-312-42553-8

A number of MBA bookstores have been sent reading copies of THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, courtesy of Henry Holt & Company. MBA and the publisher would love to have your comments, reviews, and praise for this fascinating book. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!

THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN and Hustvedt’s previous book WHAT I LOVED are excellent choices for reading groups. (See the READER’S GUIDE for each book below!)

Author Siri Hustvedt can be available to do phone-ins to your store’s book clubs and reading groups. If you would like to set up a phone conference call, please contact Maggie Richards at Henry Holt for assistance and guidelines, Maggie.Richards@hholt.com .

Downloads

• Midwest Connections marketing info & Rebate Form (PDF)
• SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN special offer order form (PDF)
• WHAT I LOVED special offer order form (PDF)
• THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN reading group discussion guide (PDF)
• WHAT I LOVED reading group discussion guide (PDF)
• SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN small B&W print ad (PDF)
• Book photo (JPG)
• Author photo (JPG)
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials

About the Book

“Struggling with ghosts, past and present, the Davidsen family embarks on a journey of self-discovery when their father dies. Hustvedt draws on her own deceased father’s journals to show how secrets revealed in death can change the meaning of our lives. Set in NYC and Hustvedt’s childhood home of Minnesota, the drama of this novel is not the stuff of soap operas, but rather, the revelation that what may seem extraordinary upon discovery becomes, in the end, an ordinary life.”
- Beth Golay, Marketing Manager, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS

“In THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, Siri Hustvedt deals with our lives when they are jolted by death. The mysteries that are uncovered sometimes are without answers, the people we thought we knew in life turn out to be different, and the impact of others’ lives on our own is unpredictable. There are two major deaths in the book, of a parent and a spouse, but she also examines other deaths, those of relationships and ideals. Hustvedt creates characters of varied ages and both genders who are all struggling with perceptions and realities. The reader is drawn into their world from the first page. This is not a bleak novel, however. Throughout we are inspired by not only the frailties of human nature, but the overwhelming resilience of spirit. Ultimately this is a story of heroes both dead and living.”
- Sue Zumberge, Common Good Books, Saint Paul, MN

THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another.
When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and un-bandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral.

Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik’s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father’s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband’s double life.

Hustvedt draws on her own family’s history in Minnesota (the diary and journal in the book belonged to her late father) and her fascination with psychiatry as she creates a quintessential American story of Norwegian-American immigration and assimilation and its unspoken legacies: fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. The result is a novel of exquisitely moving prose that reveals one family’s hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.

Siri Hustvedt returns to her Midwest roots with the publication of THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN. She is the author of three previously novels, the critically acclaimed What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as a collection of essays, A Plea for Eros. Originally from Northfield, Minnesota, and a graduate of St. Olaf College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.