Bound, Antonya Nelson
Bound, Antonya Nelson
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
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Bound
A Novel

Author: Antonya Nelson

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 8 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/29/2010

Categories: Fiction, Family Life


Synopsis

Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson's most accomplished and emotionally riveting work.

Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.

In a time of haunting and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

About Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including the short story collection Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies, such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Antonya has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the United States Artists Simon Fellowship. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carolyn on November 09, 2010

Reviewed in the LA Times [URL not allowed] One pleasure of reading Antonya Nelson is that she brings the careful language and control of literary fiction to uncontrolled, rough-and-tumble lives. Mixing the admittedly bourgeois undertaking of meticulously crafted prose with worki......more

Goodreads review by Miles on January 21, 2011

I was surprised to read that Antonya Nelson had written nine works of fiction but not surprised to find out that she teaches creative writing. "Bound" is full of great writing about character and background, but never seems to develop any story or characters. Incidents happen, characters interact. T......more

Goodreads review by Hope on February 14, 2011

I received this book as a gift (not from GoodReads) but I almost didn't read it because I thought it was going to be something dreary and/or gory about a serial killer and a missing teen and I was just not in the mood for that. However, the opening (told from a dog's point of view) pulled me in and......more

Goodreads review by Kendra on August 23, 2010

I was so excited when I won this book from goodreads. Bound is a character-driven drama that keeps you reading even though it doesn't have much of a story line. Antonya Nelson is a very talented author that describes everything in such detail that you find yourself visualizing it. Nelson's character......more

Goodreads review by Susan on October 11, 2010

This was my first introduction to the work of Antonya Nelson. She is an excellent writer with sharply honed descriptive powers. I thought that parts of the book, particularly the beginning, were excellent set pieces. I subsequently discovered that the author is a well known short story writer. I wil......more