January: “Mothers and Sons” by Adam Haslett
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
Our January 2025 Book of the Month
ABOUT THE BOOK
At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter’s numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.
Ann, his mother, who runs a women’s retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.
With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and the love that might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (New York Times).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Haslett is the author of the novel Union Atlantic and the New York Times best-selling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. The collection was one of Time Magazine’s Five Best Books of the Year, a selection of Today’s book club, and the winner of the 2006 PEN/Malamud Award. Haslett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale Law School, he currently lives in New York City.
© Literary Affairs, 2005-2026. All Rights Reserved.