[A] strikingly assured debut.
A novel that grows more complex and more uproarious by the page, culminating in an unforgettable climax.
--Entertainment Weekly (The Must List)A Real Simple Best Book of the Year (So Far)Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by The Millions and PureWowA vibrant and perceptive novel about a father's plot to win back his children's inheritanceArthur Alter is in trouble.
A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him.
And then there's the money--the small fortune his late wife, Francine, kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children.
Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate, and Maggie, a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a noble life of self-imposed poverty.
On the verge of losing the family home, Arthur invites his children back to St.
Louis under the guise of a reconciliation.
But in doing so, he unwittingly unleashes a Pandora's box of age-old resentments and long-buried memories--memories that orbit Francine, the matriarch whose life may hold the key to keeping them together.
Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St.
Louis, and a small desert outpost in Zimbabwe, The Altruists is a darkly funny (and ultimately tender) family saga that confronts the divide between baby boomers and their millennial offspring.
It's a novel about money, privilege, politics, campus culture, dating, talk therapy, rural sanitation, infidelity, kink, the American beer industry, and what it means to be a good person.
