Bug Hollow - by Michelle Huneven (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A family novel that follows the Samuelson clan over four decades as they hurt and heal one another"--

Book Synopsis

*One of 50 books TODAY can't wait to read in 2025*

"Deeply satisfying...Feels like watching a master painter at work." --Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis's girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.

Michelle Huneven is "known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good" (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.

Review Quotes

"A gift: top-drawer fiction and a family story that speaks of the joys, sorrows, and surprising possibilities of human connection . . . Serendipitous meetings invite redos, showing the beauty of life's circular nature. Readers will be charmed by a sense of nostalgia and interdependence that speaks to the best in humanity. Fans of Anne Tyler will enjoy Huneven's strong sense of place, quirky menagerie of characters, and the intriguing, relevant issues the Samuelson family navigates through chapters of their life together." --Booklist (starred review)

"Huneven is good at unlikable characters, making them fully three-dimensional while stopping far short of sappy redemption . . . A deeply satisfying novel; Huneven's best work to date." --Kirkus (starred review)

"Phil and Sibyl Samuelson and their three children are at the center of this deeply satisfying novel, but Huneven's leaps through time and stories provide constant surprise and delights. The reader finds herself in the leafy green of California, then Saudi Arabia for a business trip, then by the side of an old woman who has unexpectedly fallen in love. We go into the cul-de-sacs of these characters' lives, experiencing moments they might not write down in their own biographies, but which shape them forever. Reading the novel feels like watching a master painter at work: color is laid down, forms emerge, and then at the end your breath is taken away, because it has all come together." --Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

"Michelle Huneven's wondrous and intimate journey of the Samuelson family embedded me with their deepest secrets, greatest loves, epic heartbreaks, and a grief that touched them all for generations. Huneven's piercing observations of moments big and small left me feeling not just their witness, but more a distant relative emotionally invested in their outcome. I'm going to carry the Samuelsons in my heart for a very long time." --Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club

"Bug Hollow crackles with compassion and propulsion, offering the layered and propulsive pleasures of the long view--the evolving fortunes and dynamics of a family across decades--without ever surrendering the texture of their days or the pulse of their trippy hearts, their capacity to surprise themselves and us. I inhaled this book in a weekend, grateful to feel it simmering and swirling inside me, regretting only that it would ever end. Michelle Huneven is a treasure, and Bug Hollow gives us the song of her sentences and the glorious telescope of her attention with a whittled, nimble intensity that took my breath away." --Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

"Michelle Huneven is such an elegant, watchful writer, and she has immense love and compassion for her characters. This is a novel that lays bare the tenderness of the world, exploring its breadth and smallness at once. I adored it." --Claire Lombardo, author of Same as it Ever Was

"Bug Hollow is a deeply immersive novel about a middle class, Californian family, with its closely held secrets, loves and tragedy. With the breadth of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles and the intimate ironic pleasures of Barbara Pym, Huneven spans the American century and at the center is a mysterious woman; brilliant, mean, held back by her time, harsh, and beloved. I couldn't put it down." --Mona Simpson, author of Commitment

About the Author

Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, and Search. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her master's in fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.