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Product Description
Living in San Francisco with his girlfriend and her daughter, Ben Suskind finds his life thrown into upheaval when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his birth mother and embarks on a painful, secret quest to find out the truth about his past. A first novel.
Amazon.com Review
"When you're adopted, everything's contingent." So says Ben Suskind, the narrator of Joshua Henkin's debut novel, Swimming Across the Hudson. Ben knows what he's talking about: the sons of different birth mothers, he and his brother Jonathan were both adopted by Orthodox Jewish parents and brought up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a religious/intellectual/political hothouse that left them gasping for air and the opportunity to figure themselves out. For Ben, claiming an identity means meeting his birth mother, an event that is both shocking--she informs him he wasn't born a Jew--and depressing--he's bored by her. For Jonathan, it means admitting his homosexuality to his family.
Exploring serious issues of identity, family, and where you turn when the chips are down, Swimming Across the Hudson is filled with perceptive insights and told in quiet, fluid prose. This auspicious first novel augurs well for Joshua Henkin.
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