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Shop nowSons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
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Learn moreFrom the award–winning author of No One Is Here Except All of Us comes an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and ’70s that suddenly loses its fortune—and its bearings.
Labor Day 1976, Martha’s Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar—married with three children—are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: there is no more money. More specifically, there’s no more money in the estate of Fern’s recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar’s income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals. Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine.
Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility approached by award–winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting.
Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, One Story, the Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere. She has been long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the Pushcart Prize.
What do you do with a BA in English from Princeton University? You go to New York to pursue an acting career, and end up putting all of your skills together as an audiobook narrator. Elisabeth Rodgers first started recording audiobooks for the National Library Service of the Library of Congress at the American Foundation for the Blind (Talking Book Productions) in New York City. After she had numerous titles under her belt, she branched out, and has since narrated over 100 titles for a variety of publishers. She was the recipient of an Audie Award for the full-cast recording of Sherlock's Secret Life in 2000. Her work on The Last Chinese Chef, Annexed, The Naked Eye, and Mapping the Heavens garnered AudioFile magazine's prized Earphones Awards, and she was lucky enough to join the star-studded cast of Audible, Inc.'s Audie-nominated production of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, as well as the Earphones-winning MetaBook audio-drama production of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Elisabeth continues to work both onstage and in the studio. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York City.
Reviews
“A book brimming with life by an author bursting with talent.”
“Ausubel charts the unfolding crisis with tenderness, wit, and a sly understanding of wealth and its limitations.”
“Devilishly imaginative”
“Ausubel’s often whimsical prose is in top form yet again as she imbues the story with her signature touch of magic.”
“Ausubel’s timely, sophisticated tale explores what happens when a charmed life loses its luster.”
“An imaginative read with a dash of drama and some deep insight on wealth and class in America.”
“Weird and wonderful…Ausubel’s writing, melancholy and fine, shines in illuminating everyday scenes of life.”
“Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a charming summer tale of wealth and its loss…Fern and Cricket especially endear through their apt, universal observations on motherhood and childhood.”
“A terrific exuberance and tenderness drives the telling, as it wings back and forth in time: full-blooded, sorrowing, funny, lush with backstories and images so acute you read them twice, three times.”
“Ausubel’s characters steer her bold and absorbing novel and keep us emotionally invested in their foibles, ideals, and desires.”
“Full of wisdom and wonderfully meditative insights on wealth and class in America.”
“Fortunes and hearts are lost and found in a modern fairy tale set in the 1960s and ‘70s…[a] magical, engrossing story.”
“Ausubel offers an incisive look at these schismatic years in American history and how they affect this couple and their friends and family members…There is true wit in the author’s depiction of these tumultuous decades, and with characters this memorable, the pages almost turn themselves.”
“As the narrative moves between 1966, 1967, and 1976, Ausubel considers the historical plight of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery on wealth…Ausubel offers a piercing view of the subtleties of class and privilege and what happens when things go awry.”
“Elisabeth Rodgers is a skilled narrator who is able to give some semblance of emotion to these spoiled, basically unlikable, characters.”
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