Description:
Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family--a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens.
In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, as events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives.
As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal.
Evoking a generous and humane spirit in a story that ranges over three continents, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.
Brief description:
Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction, including Improvement, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Secrets of Happiness was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews. Other of her works have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and The Story Prize. She lives in New York and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA degree program.
Review Quotes:
"Rich with the complexities of life...The stories create a world made fully dimensional through changes of perspective."
-- "Wall Street Journal"