Hurry, before the summer winds to an end, and grab this book!! You’ll devour it in no time, I promise! This is a delicious tale to relax with on the deck, by the setting sun with the tinkling of smooth jazz in the background (and a Whisky Sour or two!) You’ll find yourself completely immersed in the 50s where the rich housewives are bored and boozey and packing up to spend summer-time at Tiger House in Martha’s Vineyard.
Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, offers her thoughts on the back cover: “With sultry prose and a sure hand for suspense, Liza Klaussmann expertly weaves a vivid tale of glamour and despair, fidelity and betrayal, secrets and abandon. Tigers in Red Weather will have you furiously postponing all human interaction until its gripping finale.”
Now there’s a humdinger of a quote that snaps with perfection! I opened the book and found myself sucked in immediately! (I also had a strange craving for a Harvey Wallbanger and a Whisky Sour!) You’ll definitely find it hard to pull your attention away from the pages and they just zip by and turn themselves so effortlessly.
The story unfolds using five (very different) perspectives which go back and forth in time: 1.) we first hear from Nick, the spoiled and privileged girl whose family owns Tiger’s House and 2.) turning to Daisy, Nick’s daughter, 3.) on to Helena, Nick’s beloved and favourite cousin 4.) then to Nick’s husband Hughes and finally finishing off with 5.) Ed, Helena’s (very, very, very creepy, creepy) son.
Each character shows that when you scratch just below the surface all outward appearances are definitely not what they seem to be, for any of them. A brilliant expose of what could really have gone on behind closed doors during this often romanticized post-WWII time.
The whole thing is crazy brilliant good! An enormous and enthusiastic Literary Hoarders’ stamp of approval for Tiger’s in Red Weather!
Story synopsis: Summer seemed to arrive at that moment, with its mysterious mixture of salt, cold flesh and fuel.
Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha’s Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their ‘real lives’: Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.
Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena’s husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena–with their children, Daisy and Ed–try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.
Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.
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