The Most

Contributors

By Jessica Anthony

Read by Abigail Reno

Formats and Prices

Price

$18.99

Format

From “one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page” (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.
 
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.
 
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.
 

  • “Jessica Anthony’s The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing. The novel captures a haunting unrest at the core of midcentury American life, treating its aimlessly striving characters with a stern caress of grace. The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting.”
    ISLE MCELROY, author of PEOPLE COLLIDE
  • “With Enter the Aardvark Jessica Anthony proved herself to be one of the most inventive writers working today. That book should have prepared me for her ingenious new novella, The Most, but somehow it didn’t. Trust me, though. The Most is a must.”
    RICHARD RUSSO, author of EMPIRE FALLS and the NORTH BATH Trilogy

On Sale
Jul 30, 2024
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781668641422

Jessica Anthony

About the Author

Jessica Anthony is the author of three books of fiction, most recently the novel Enter the Aardvark, a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award in Literature, Anthony wrote The Most while guarding the Mária Valéria Bridge in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She lives in Portland, Maine.

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