'Bad Mother' author returns to fiction with 'Red Hook Road'

I don’t know yet if I’m taking a vacation this summer, but if it happens, Ayelet Waldman’s latest will be tucked in my suitcase. Red Hook Road is being published in July 13. It’s her first novel since 2006′s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, which interviewer Alden Mudge called “sharply observed, completely absorbing and sometimes wickedly humorous. Like Lionel Shriver and Zoe Heller, Waldman has a gift for creating flawed, and therefore human, characters. You may not always like them, but you root for them.

Red Hook Road sounds a little more dramatic than Love, which centered on the not-so-unusual dilemma of a stepmother struggling to accept her role. In an interview with Amazon, Waldman says that Red Hook Road was inspired by a newspaper story—a young couple, killed in a car crash on their way to their wedding reception. On her twitter feed, she describes it more succinctly: “Abt 2 families in Maine, connected & divided by tragedy and hope. Hey, just pulled that outa my butt. Pretty good!”