Shelter in Place (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781620404874)

"Very funny and unexpected, a material response to our times, plush as velvet." -Rachel Cusk

"A wickedly funny and emotionally expansive novel about all the bewildering ways we seek solace from the people and things that surround us." - Jenny Offill

David Leavitt returns with his signature "coolly elegant prose" (O, The Oprah Magazine) to deliver a comedy of manners for the Trump era.

It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva's husband, Bruce-the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva's challenge.

Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitu s and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair.

A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped.

Author: David Leavitt
ISBN-10: 1620404877
ISBN-13: 9781620404874
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: English
Published: 10/13/2020
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2020
Publishers Weekly 08/17/2020
Booklist 09/01/2020 pg. 39
Shelf Awareness 10/20/2020

About the Author
David Leavitt's novels and story collections include Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, Arkansas, The Indian Clerk (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award), and The Two Hotel Francforts. He is also the author of two nonfiction books, Florence, A Delicate Case and The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. He is co-director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, where he is Professor of English and edits the journal Subtropics.