The Good Parents: A Novel

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A two-time winner of Australias prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award, Joan Londons debut novel, Gilgamesh, was published to rapturous acclaim both in her native Australia and in the United States. Now, London has delivered The Good Parents, a tender and compelling tale of mother love and the harrowing moment when a daughter spreads her wings and vanishes from her parents orbit. Maya de Jong is an eighteen-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne and begins an affair with her new boss. When Mayas parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive for a visit, Maya is goneno one knows where. Maya, for reasons of her own, leaves haunting clues in late-night calls to her brother at home, carefully avoiding detection by the two people who love her most. Ultimately, to find her daughter Toni will have to revisit a part of her past that she thought she had shut off foreverthe closest she ever came to being a lost girl herself. The Good Parents is at once utterly contemporary and a story as old as humanity itself: a stunning portrait of familial love and how far we can drift apart in the moments between the words we speak.

Reviews

"A domestic unraveling that, in the elegance, economy, and psychological acuity of its telling, honors the many Chekhovian and Tolstoyan echoes in its pages." -- Geordie Williamson
"Although you are tickled by the urge to know what happens in the end, this is a novel you read slowly, with steadily increasing pleasure and interest, getting to know the widely varied and vividly realized characters, savoring the experience of so thoroughly Inhabiting someone else's world and taking it away with you at the end." -- Katharine England
"Ought to win every prize going . . . The writing can be so quietly lyrical you want to read very slowly, the suspense enough to make you want to race to the finish. . . . If London never writes another word, The Good Parents is more than enough." -- Cath Kenneally
"Supremely satisfying . . . an exquisite piece of writing, carefully and deliberately told." -- Claire Sutherland
"Underwritten by a wealth of human understanding . . . London pushes characters toward each other against the forces of nature. The results are as powerful as they are unsettling." -- Michael McGirr