La Famille Samuelson

Three-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and James Beard Award winner Michelle Huneven’s Bug Hollow, a family novel that follows the Samuelson clan over four decades as they hurt and heal one another

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the 70s. He had found joy in the commune there, but died in a freak accident months later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’ girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband Phil had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.

Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters citation). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.