The Honeymoon Justin Haythe by Justin Haythe 9780802141835, 0802141838, B002C73P0G instant download after payment.

Who takes their mother on honeymoon with them? Gordon Garrety does - and it doesn’t turn out well in Justin Haythe’s unsettling character study.

After a year of marriage, Gordon and Annie finally take their long-delayed honeymoon to Venice, accompanied by Maureen, Gordon’s eccentric mother, and her new friend, Gerhardt. The happy couple are instantly seduced by the world’s most unlikely city, but the brilliance of Venice seems to distort rather than illuminate. The story gathers a palpable intensity before a single act of absurd but devastating violence pricks their bubble, and lays bare the emptiness at the core of their gilded lives.

"Justin Haythe's first novel, "The Honeymoon," is an ice-cold study of expatriate anomie. His characters float through hotel lobbies with a transatlantic disaffection that would make Fitzgerald blush in this story where the family flies business class and the children address their parents by their first names."   -  Gabe Weisert, The Atlantic

A deeply observant and expertly crafted tale, “The Honeymoon looks askance upon the beautiful and splendid, plumbing the stilted emotional depths of two wayward Americans who appear to have arrived via Henry James into the late 1980’s” (The Los Angeles Times).