Living the Dream by Isabelle Dupuy

Living the Dream by Isabelle Dupuy

Safe in their love, Tom and Naomi Barnes pursue their dream of family and prosperity as transplants to a London brimming with immigrants and opportunities. Tom works long hours for a super hedge fund and Naomi, while bringing up their boys, is commissioned by fellow prep school mum and immigrant Solange Wolf, to write her memoir. Solange's story of survival and triumph, from the slums in Haiti to becoming an executive with a Fortune 500 company, and inter-racially married to an equally successful man, has a profound effect on Naomi, herself a mixed-race transplant from Colombia married to a white British man full of ambition and potential. Everyone she knows back in Cartagena, including her own mother would kill for a marriage like hers. As Tom grows in wealth and power, he assumes control over the direction of his family's life, including the direction of Naomi's. She feels herself shrinking into a cardboard cutout of herself, adorned in beautiful clothes, diamond jewelry, and all the trappings of money. She watches Tom create a life that has no need for her as a woman, only as a mother and trophy wife. When Tom tells her, he is voting Brexit to please his boss, Naomi finally decides to take action. She heads to Solange's house where she finds a heartbroken Solange who declares that her husband has suddenly left her for a younger woman pregnant with his child. Despite the years of hard work, she implores Naomi to burn the manuscript, insisting her entire life has become a lie. With this rash request, Naomi starts to doubt not only Solange's grasp on reality but her own, and although the two women try to heal, their wounds run deep, and London, without the backing of powerful men, is now a strange and alienating backdrop against which they must redefine themselves.

A magnetic and affecting tale filled with both humor and pain, Living the Dream depicts the glamorous yet flawed lives of two immigrant women in pre and post Brexit LondonThis layered and captivating novel is at times out loud funny and other times heartbreaking, yet we are constantly charmed by its narrator and her muse, or rather her muses, which include Colombia, Haiti, England, and beyond. * Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory *

Isabelle Dupuy grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, studied and lived in the USA and moved to London twenty years ago with a job in the City. She started writing when she became a mother. Living the Dream is her first novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781913090050
ISBN 10	1913090051
Title	Living the Dream
Author	Isabelle Dupuy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd
Year published	2019-11-21
Number of pages	248
Prizes	Long-listed for The Diverse Book Awards 2020 (UK)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable