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The Usual Desire to Kill

Author:
Binding: Hardcover
List Price: $36.99
Our Price: $5.25 $3.93 CAD
Sale Price: 3.53 CAD
Qty Avail: 280


ISBN: 9781668062838
Publisher: Scribner
Language: English
Page Count: 249
Publication Date: 4/1/2025
Size: 8.63" l x 5.75" w x 0.88"
Series: N/A

Category Subject
Fiction Literary
Fiction Family Life
A “droll, psychologically astute…unexpected…very funny” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air) and moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of decades-old food.

Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”

This wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

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