Sophie McManus - The Unfortunates: A Novel

A sharply written, funny and heart-breaking debut about inheritance, influence, class and power. Who knew the rich deserved our pity?

CeCe Somner, once known for her cruel wit as much as for her tremendous generosity, is now in opulent decline. Afflicted with a rare disease and touched by mortality for the first time, her gilded, bygone values collide with an unforgiving present. As her troubled, spoiled son George and his outsider wife, Iris, struggle to resolve mounting financial and familial troubles, CeCe must face the Somner dynasty’s dark legacy; all three must learn what life beyond the long, shimmering shadow cast by the family’s past may become. But when George’s secrets culminate in an unexpected crime, no riches can put things right for the unfortunate Somners.

The Unfortunates is a rollicking, wide-ranging story of pharmaceutical drug trials and Wall Street corruption; of pride and prejudice; of paranoia and office politics; of inheritance, influence, class and power. Hilarious and heartbreaking, Sophie McManus's debut is a meditation on love and a contemporary American tragedy of breathtaking scope.

PRAISE
McManus, with her intricate re-creation of CeCe’s regal life, hearkens to an earlier artist far less frequently invoked: Edith Wharton . . . some of the funniest writing I’ve read in years: Martin Amis funny; wheezing, choke-on-your-laughter funny. After reading so many comic novels that eventually shatter in brittle cynicism or evaporate in gassy sentimentality, I moved through The Unfortunates with a slowly accruing sense of awe as these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
- Washington Post

McManus, with her intricate re-creation of CeCe’s regal life, hearkens to an earlier artist far less frequently invoked: Edith Wharton . . . some of the funniest writing I’ve read in years: Martin Amis funny; wheezing, choke-on-your-laughter funny. After reading so many comic novels that eventually shatter in brittle cynicism or evaporate in gassy sentimentality, I moved through The Unfortunates with a slowly accruing sense of awe as these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
- Washington Post

The Unfortunates is both a mirror on the income inequality of the current moment and a social novel in the old, grand, plotty mode: voracious for detail and punctuated by gasp-inducing turns of fate. Its subjects are money and the people unfortunate enough to have it. Who knew the rich deserved so much to be pitied?
- Salvatore Scibona, author of THE END

What is truly rich about this stunning debut novel, beyond the over privileged social class in question, is the brilliant language—lucid, quick, accessible, yet almost cubist in its syntactical swerves and surprising word choices—with which Sophie McManus invests the inner lives of the Somners, mother, son, and daughter-in-law – three unforgettable protagonists.
- Jaimy Gordon, author of LORD OF MISRULE

In finely etched detail as sharp as shards of glass, McManus reveals the corrupting power of wealth and the myriad ways it infects individual lives, and families.As relevant as it is compulsively readable.
- Amanda Coplin, author of THE ORCHARDIST

Is there anything Sophie McManus can’t do? The virtuosity in these pages is astonishing, but just as astonishing is this novel’s abiding heart.
- Joshua Henkin, author of THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU

Sophie McManus has a shrewd eye for telling gestures and an ear for cruel speech and kindness.She is an incisive, surprising prose stylist, and her debut novel, The Unfortunates, heralds an exciting new talent with an old soul.
- Christine Schutt, author of PROPSEROUS FRIENDS