Family of Origin

A Novel

By: CJ Hauser

Narrated by: Kristen Sieh

Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

BONUS: Includes the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife"

"An innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer's best novel thus far." (NPR.org)

"The most oddly enticing novel you will read this year.... Keenly satirical yet unashamedly tender." (Wall Street Journal)

"Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff.... Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser's latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels." (Booklist, starred)

When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged, older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years.

Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here, their father's fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity's best days are behind us.

On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past. Stuck together in the close quarters of their island stilt-house, and provoked by the absurd antics of the remaining Reversalists, years of family secrecy and blame between Elsa and Nolan threaten to ruin them all over again. As the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, they begin to fear that they were their father's first evidence that the future held no hope.

In the irreverent and exuberant spirit of Kevin Wilson, Alissa Nutting, and Karen Russell, CJ Hauser speaks to a generation's uncertainties: Is it possible to live in our broken world with both scientific pragmatism and hope? What does one generation owe another? How do we know which parts of the past, and ourselves, to jettison and which to keep? Delightfully funny, fiercely original, high-spirited and warm, Family of Origin grapples with questions of nature and nurture, evolution and mating, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

©2019 CJ Hauser (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"CJ Hauser's Family of Origin is strange in that way raw honesty often is. It is sharp in its prose and in how it can so cleanly make you feel pierced through. Hauser lures us to an island and from there we learn of family and loss and the nature of our essential humanity. Funny and unforgettable." (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black)

“A strange and heartbreaking novel…Hauser's ability to render the complexities of family relationships with radical honesty is a feat…A lesser writer would not be able to deliver the disturbing and weird with the grace that Hauser does. A unique, poignant, and slightly taboo novel about family, biology, and evolution.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“Hauser impresses with her wistful contemporary tale of family bonds and misplaced pessimism...This shimmering take on grief and family will enthrall fans of character-driven stories with its bevy of dashed dreams and cluttered emotions.” (Publishers Weekly)

"Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff... Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser's latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels." (Booklist, starred)

Who is the audience for this book ?

Pretty disappointing read - it’s hard to see who would be interested in the biological background along with all the navel gazing millennial angst. The storyline is novel at first but I gave up and skipped the last third, just too graphic in many places …especially regarding teenage first encounters. Not sure who would find that interesting to read …

I hate giving bad reviews

The thing is, this author is a really good writer. I bought this book because I read an essay she wrote that was simply breathtaking.
But this book. Well written, but so depressing. There’s a sexually abusive relationship, and the damage of that is sort of...waved away. I could not like one of the main characters, no matter how I tried. The end was supposed to be hopeful, but by that time I was kind of on the side of humanity dying out.