The Heirs: A Novel
by Susan Rieger
Buy on AmazonThe question that Susan Rieger explores in The Heirs is a fascinating one: Does death root us in memory as the people we were while breathing, or should consequent data, gathered after the fact, be used to ret-con the recollections of the survivors? Or, put more simply, is a good man forever a good man even after death shakes loose secrets he kept hidden in life? Though never explicitly answered – or answered in different ways by different characters – the primary joy in The Heirs is in chewing over Rieger’s gorgeous prose. The entire book reads in a clipped, clean, lockjawed voice, as if the words themselves had all gone to Vassar and spent their summers boating in the Hamptons.
Recommended by
"The question that Susan Rieger explores in The Heirs is a fascinating one: Does death root us in memory as the people we were while breathing, or should consequent data, gathered after the fact, be used to ret-con the recollections of the survivors? Or, put more simply, is a good man forever a good man even after death shakes loose secrets he kept hidden in life? Though never explicitly answered – or answered in different ways by different characters – the primary joy in The Heirs is in chewing over Rieger’s gorgeous prose. The entire book reads in a clipped, clean, lockjawed voice, as if the words themselves had all gone to Vassar and spent their summers boating in the Hamptons."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org