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Join us for the SDWF’s August Book Club!
#1 Indie Next Pick for June
One of 2021’s Most Highly Anticipated New Books — Newsweek
38 Novels You Need to Read this Summer — Lit Hub
One of Alma‘s Favorite Books for Summer 2021
When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated.
Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope.
Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.
JOSHUA HENKIN is the author of the novels Swimming Across the Hudson (a Los Angeles Times Notable Book), Matrimony (a New York Times Notable Book), and The World Without You (winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish Fiction and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.
“The task of writing the story of a family dealing with the devastating impact of early-onset Alzheimer’s—without veering into sentimentality, or collapsing beneath the weight of melancholy—isn’t an easy one. But Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights manages to tell the story of Pru and her husband Spence, once a great Shakespearean scholar and professor, with such deep humanity and kindness that I forgave him for also having managed to write a page-turner (though it still feels slightly unfair to be able to do both). The novel is a portrait of a family in all its complexity and an exploration of care work—both paid and unpaid—the latter of which makes it feel especially timely.” —Lit Hub
“Henkin has managed to inject humor as well as pathos into a searing portrait of a family in crisis. . . . Morningside Heights is beautifully written, and nothing mars the undeniable power of this poignant and very intelligent novel.” —Rita D. Jacobs, World Literature Today
“Henkin brilliantly conveys the complexities of a New York City family in this humane, compulsively readable tale . . . In 2006, Shakespeare scholar Spence Robin, 57, is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and his wife, Pru Steiner, is forced to return his book advance . . . [Henkin] shows how Spence was a wunderkind in Columbia’s English department, making the tragedy of his illness particularly poignant . . . Equally well handled is Pru’s transformation from wife and lover to caretaker—wrenching changes that Henkin conveys without dissolving into sentimentality or cliché, but rather leaving readers with a kernel of hope. This is a stunning achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A superstar literature professor is struck down in his prime in the cruelest possible way . . . Henkin specializes in melancholy stories about complicated families, and this one is a real heartbreaker. His portrait of Pru is nuanced and sensitive, following her into one of the darkest places a spouse can go and hitting the notes just right . . . Caring for a spouse with Alzheimer’s is an ever more common heartbreak, illuminated by this tender portrait of a marriage.” —Kirkus Reviews
