Claire Lombardo presents Same As It Ever Was

In her ambitious sophomore novel, SAME AS IT EVER WAS —another elegant and tumultuous story in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Celeste Ng, and Jonathan Franzen—Lombardo introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, this time by way of a singularly complicated protagonist, showcasing the consummate style, signature wit, knife-sharp dialogue, knotty familial bonds, and profound emotional intelligence that made her debut such a breakout family drama.

After a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, Julia Ames has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that

always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty-seven, that she has a firm handle on things. She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS traverses the rocky terrain of real life, exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.

Claire Lombardo is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Fun We Ever Had, which was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and has been optioned for television by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Grinnell College and lives in Minneapolis, MN.

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