Swell

Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel" Harper's Bazaar) Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.

When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home Sue relents after years of resisting and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return Sue's father-in-law Sy buys the family -- Sue Dan and their two daughters -- a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway Queens a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in too. And the house is haunted.

On the weekend of Sue's conversion party ninety-year-old Rose who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim -- formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway) a former lifeguard former firefighter and reformed alcoholic -- who feels for reasons even he can't explain inordinately protective of the Glassmans.

The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.