Books >
Carry the One

Carry the One Browse Inside Carry the One
Carry the One
A Novel  
By Carol Anshaw
This edition: Hardcover, 272 pages
Availability: Ships on or around March 6, 2012
List Price: $25.00
Your Price: $20.00 You Save $5.00 (20%)
Pre Order or Buy from another online retailer
Also available in

Description


Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect. As they seek redemption through addiction, social justice, and art, Anshaw’s characters reflect our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding. This wise, wry, and erotically charged novel derives its power and appeal from the author’s exquisite use of language; her sympathy for her recognizable, very flawed characters; and her persuasive belief in the transforming forces of time and love.
Related multimediaclose x

Video

1 to 2 of 2
  • 1635265513_1352336660001_10-full
    1. Carry the One
    03:37
    1351083285001
  • 1635265513_1405113466001_th-1405089628001
    2. Carry the One
    03:37
    1405087740001
See more multimedia
"Anshaw has a deft touch with the events of ordinary life, giving them heft and meaning. . . . Funny, touching, knowing . . . a quiet, lovely, genuine accomplishment."
-- Publishers Weekly (boxed starrred review)
“Masterful in her authenticity, quicksilver dialogue, wise humor, and receptivity to mystery, Anshaw has
created a deft and transfixing novel of fallibility and quiet glory.”
-- Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Anshaw deftly depicts family ties broken and reconnected, portraying the best and the worst of this group of eccentrics. Recommended for readers of well-crafted literary fiction.”
-- Library Journal
“Sharply observed and warmly understanding--another fine piece of work from this talented author.”
-- Kirkus Reviews
“Here's passion and addiction, guilt and damage, all the beautiful mess of family life. Carry the One will lift readers off their feet and bear them along on its eloquent tide.”
-- Emma Donoghue, author of Room
“Reading this book, I felt like I was watching someone cross a tightrope with the same relaxed, assured stride they would use on solid ground. Anshaw is in such graceful command that her story about three gifted, wounded siblings almost doesn’t feel like fiction. The traumatic accident that derails the characters’ lives as young adults is a sort of echo of the childhood damage they’ve already lived through. The ways that they do and don’t survive this are variously tragic, stark, and beautiful, but always utterly convincing. Along the way, the generous Anshaw doles out psychological acuity, antic humor, cultural critique and profound wisdom as the merest casual asides. It can’t be as effortless as she makes it look, but it’s a pleasure to soar with her, for a while, on that high wire.”
-- Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“This deceptively casual novel is both intimate and mysterious, frank and elusive, full of the stuff of life--love, lust, drugs, dogs, marriage, children, divorce, art, prisons, and politics--while haunted every shimmering page of the way by the death of a young girl, whose ghostly presence poses one of this novel’s compelling questions: how can we disentangle old knots when new ones are being tied with every passing day?”
-- Scott Spencer, author of Man in the Woods and Endless Love
“Featuring Carol Anshaw's trademark warmth, wit and erotic subtlety, Carry the One is loopy and funny, sad and complex. Painterly, lifelike, it provides grownup pleasure.”
-- James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street
“It’s my birthday and the phone rings and I don’t want to answer because I am reading Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One, and how can reality compare?”
-- Nicole Hollander, creator of “Sylvia”
“A laser-focused, compulsively readable tale of chance and fate with a big brain, sharp tongue, and huge heart. . . . This book is undeniably hip, but it’s not the hip of Urban Outfitters knit caps or fixed gear bicycles. Carry the One has its finger on the pulse of the . . . human condition.  That’s what makes it hip with superpowers.  That’s what makes it the platonic ideal of cool.”
-- Kit Steinkellner, bookriot.com
“Anshaw has a way of writing that nails the psychology of humans. She explores the complicated relationships between men and women, sister and brother, mother and daughter, by breaking wide open inhibitions, those sticky boundaries that hold us back and that pesky fear business that keeps us hiding in our closets…It is intense, sweet, honest, and hopeful, all at the same time.”
-- redheadedbookchild.com
Carol Anshaw's Books
Displaying 1 of
See All Carol Anshaw books