Laments - Hardcover

A fine novel, about family, migration, identity and the struggle to find and hold onto it. It is also hugely entertaining and very, very funny. - Roddy Doyle In THE LAMENTS, George Hagen pulls off a splendid high-wire act, creating one of the most memorable and compelling families since the Flying Wallendas. His writing is luminous, humane, and wonderfully acerbic - as if Evelyn Waugh got a hold of John Irving's characters and handed them all Pimm s No. 1. Hilarious and heartbreaking, this is one of the best debut novels I've read in years. - Peter Blauner, author of THE INTRUDER and MAN OF T A vital international journey through the vicissitudes of family life. This story, centering on the timeless theme of a child swapped at birth, is immensely readable, funny, and touching --a complete joy. - Elizabeth Strout, author of AMY AND ISABELLE George Hagen's highly entertaining debut novel features an irresistibly headstrong family, a global sweep, and not only a sense of loss and displacement that's perfectly in tune with the world we live in but also a full measure of resilient humanity. - Gary Shteyngart, author of THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S Hagen's understanding of the mix of love, banality, humor, and sadness that are the features of family life is deep and nearly flawless: a lovely book. - Kirkus Reviews Having newborn twins has left me almost no time for reading

When Howard and Julia Lament adopt Will, a baby secretly switched at birth in a bizarre hospital debacle, it marks the beginning of a journey that takes them from Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s to the Persian Gulf, England and suburban, Seventies America, as they search for their place in the world. Howard is an engineer and dreamer, obsessed by the conveyance of liquids through valves. Julia is a woman of fiery spirit and an artist, who is constantly called upon to reinvent her family's life and her own. Forced by his younger, anarchic twin brothers to question his place in the family, Will struggles to find a sense of his own identity through the characters he meets en route - from Ruth, his first love in Africa, who carries around a biscuit tin lid to admire her reflection to Dawn Snedecker, the lisping intellectual who breaks his heart in America - and fights to keep his family from breaking apart. Through the Laments' restlessness, their responses to adversity, and especially their unwieldy love for one another, George Hagen draws a picture of every family that is funny, tragic, hopeful and true.