The Angle of Falling Light

Gologorsky returns to the settings of her previous books: the American working class of Long Island and the Bronx, where the last two generations of Americans have been scarred by the legacy of foreign wars and the addictions left in their wake.

In The Angle of Falling Light, the protagonist Tessa, has no model close to her for the kind of life she’d like to lead. Her sister Marla starts using drugs, following the lead of their uncle Hack, who softens his days with alcohol and weed. Her stepfather Scotty is a vet struggling with depression. Her mom, Nina, takes refuge with a new lover and Tess, too, finds safety in a new relationship if not the direction she so desperately seeks.

The Angle of Falling Light is a book with a big cast of troubled innocents, everyone looking for a way forward, a lesson in how to give love while still putting yourself first, one of the most difficult of life’s challenges. As Gologorsky has it, some will lose this battle, while others will at least survive it."Gologorsky is the best writer of working-class fiction writing today. [She] . . . turns these lives into moments of beauty, sometimes forlorn, sometimes violent, occasionally tragic and always intrinsically human. She writes in the spirit of Greek tragedies, only in a setting defined by late stage capitalism." —Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

"Set during the 'forever wars' that followed 9/11, The Angle of Falling Light movingly explores the demons that survivors must wrestle with in the wake of tragedy. Beverly Gologorsky brings us a great cast of characters, at their center three working-class women trying to shape lives of their own in a world that seems to promise them nothing but deadening repetition. Brave and faltering, they face daunting conundrums of love, care, and the pull of freedom. Gologorsky’s unsparing vision of the bleakness so rampant in a nation addicted to combat and inequality only renders more compelling her portraits of these women bound and determined to 'make a way from no way.'" --Jan Clausen, author of Apples & OrangesBEVERLY GOLOGORSKY’S first book, the novel The Things We Do to Make it Home, published by Random House, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Fiction book, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award. About her second novel, Stop Here, Publishers Weekly wrote, “The author treats each singular story line with insight, compassion and no sentimentality.” Her third novel, Can You See the Wind? was described by Ron Jacobs in Counterpunch as “utterly fantastic and completely believable.” Describing Gologorsky’s fourth novel, Every Body Has a Story, Elizabeth Strout wrote, “Your heart might be ripped out by this book, but it will get placed back inside with a larger capacity to love and beat on.” And now in The Angle of Falling Light, she presents one of her most unforgettable heroines in Tessa, as the author continues her novel cycle of our contemporary American tragedy and the attempts of her characters to avert it, one by one.