Mona Simpson – författare

When an eavesdropping boy sets out to discover the obscure mysteries of his unravelling family, he uncovers instead what he least wants to know: the workings of his parents’ private lives. And even then he can't stop snooping.Miles Adler-Rich spies and listens in on his separating parents with the help of his friend Hector. The boys’ amateur detective work starts innocently enough. But in rifling through his mother’s dresser and snooping in her online diary, it isn’t long before they stumble into the outer reaches of the grown-up’s privacy – uncovering powerful information that will affect the family’s health, wealth and sanity.Written with pathos and brilliant imagination, Casebook is an unflinching and very different coming-of-age story from one of America’s most gifted chroniclers of modern family life.

A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother's collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from LA to college, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who believes that her children can attain all the things she hasn't, she's worked hard to secure their future. But when she enters hospital, her closest friend must keep the children safe and their mother's dreams for them alive.At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realises his life as a student may end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister Lina works in an ice-cream parlour while her wealthy classmates prepare for Ivy league schools, as she wages a high-stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to drift towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.A resonant story about family, duty, and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, it honours the spirit of imperfect mothers, and the under-chronicled significance of friends. With Commitment, Mona Simpson has written her most important and unforgettable novel.'Few novelists write about America as Mona Simpson does, with her acute understanding of the tension between external forces - economy, technology, society - and individual dreams, between nostalgia and the future, between yearning and deception. Commitment is a majestic novel about an American family and an American century, its vision and scope bringing to mind the work of Tolstoy, Stendahl, and Balzac'Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

'Quietly devastating writing' The Observer'Commitment is a majestic novel' Yiyun Li, author of The Book of GooseA masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother's collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from LA to college, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who believes that her children can attain all the things she hasn't, she's worked hard to secure their future. But when she enters hospital, her closest friend must keep the children safe and their mother's dreams for them alive.At Berkeley College, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realises his life as a student may end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister Lina works in an ice-cream parlour while her wealthy classmates prepare for Ivy league schools, as she wages a high-stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to drift towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.A resonant story about family, duty, and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, it honours the spirit of imperfect mothers, and the under-chronicled significance of friends. With Commitment, Mona Simpson has written her most important and unforgettable novel.'Moving . . . [Simpson] is up there with Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver when it comes to great chroniclers of American families'The Spectator'Simpson is a national treasure . . . I was immersed in their world and in Simpson's masterful vision for them. Simpson is so attuned to the family heart and oh dear Walter, Lina, and Donnie, have you forever moved mine'Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay