AM Homes specialises in characters, mostly men, who find themselves unexpectedly unmoored from the American way of life. Whether it be Harry in her previous novel – the 2013 Women’s prize for fiction winner May We Be Forgiven – in bed with his sister-in-law when his brother beats her to a pulp with a table lamp. Or stock-trading millionaire Richard in This Book Will Save Your Life, who after a maybe, maybe not heart attack finds himself hanging with the Hindu owner of the local doughnut shop. Her latest hero – known only as “the Big Guy” – is similarly up against it. In a novel running very precisely from election day in November 2008 to Barack Obama’s inauguration day in January 2009, this lifelong Republican donor is struggling with the idea of a black man sleeping in “his” White House.
Intent on righting what he believes is an egregious wrong, he builds around him a group of like-minded, like-resourced Republicans who will do whatever it takes to ensure the US never makes the same mistake again. But Democrats are not his only problem: the Big Guy’s wife is sliding into alcoholism while his 18-year-old daughter – after proudly casting her first vote for John McCain – is also starting to unravel. Riding her beloved gelding in the woods back at her elite east coast boarding school, Meghan encounters an injured doe. A 911 summons – her Pavlovian sense of entitlement demands an instant clean-up – only worsens the situation (euthanised doe, bolting horse, hours lost in the woods). But rather than driving her towards her father’s authoritarianism, it instead elicits the beginnings of empathy in her half-unformed soul.
