Bug Hollow

A Novel

De: Michelle Huneven

Narrado por: Emily Rankin

*One of 50 books TODAY can't wait to read in 2025*

“Deeply satisfying…Feels like watching a master painter at work.”—Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis

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 seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: 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). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.

©2022 Michelle Huneven (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Huneven is good at unlikable characters, making them fully three-dimensional while stopping far short of sappy redemption . . . A deeply satisfying novel; Huneven’s best work to date.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Phil and Sibyl Samuelson and their three children are at the center of this deeply satisfying novel, but Huneven's leaps through time and stories provide constant surprise and delights. The reader finds herself in the leafy green of California, then Saudi Arabia for a business trip, then by the side of an old woman who has unexpectedly fallen in love. We go into the cul-de-sacs of these characters' lives, experiencing moments they might not write down in their own biographies, but which shape them forever. Reading the novel feels like watching a master painter at work: color is laid down, forms emerge, and then at the end your breath is taken away, because it has all come together."—Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

“Michelle Huneven’s wondrous and intimate journey of the Samuelson family embedded me with their deepest secrets, greatest loves, epic heartbreaks, and a grief that touched them all for generations. Huneven’s piercing observations of moments big and small left me feeling not just their witness, but more a distant relative emotionally invested in their outcome. I’m going to carry the Samuelsons in my heart for a very long time.”—Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club