Split Estate

Arthur King has lived in New York for all his adult life when his wife commits suicide one afternoon while he's away. Left alone with two teenage children, overwhelmed by the prospect of city life without his wife, Arthur decides to move the family to the small Wyoming town where he grew up. They are welcomed there by his mother, a tough, observant Western woman still clinging to the family ranch (while protesting local drilling companies on the side). In elegant, penetrating prose, Charlotte Bacon follows the surviving Kings through the course of a summer as they come to terms with the emptiness—and the openness—of their new landscape, and confront the grief that glares out at them everywhere. Split Estate is a heartrending portrait of a family uprooted and struggling to reconnect in a world irrevocably changed by loss.

A wonderfully tough-minded novel from a master dramatist of the poignant, interwoven crises of modern life. SPLIT ESTATE opens with devastating scenes of a family at a horrific juncture: the wife of Arthur King and mother of his two teenage children, Celia and Cam, has recently committed suicide, jumping out the window of their New York apartment.Charlotte Bacon s luminous new novel tracks the King family as it struggles to survive in the months that follow. Arthur, an attractive lawyer who has always been edgy about city dwelling, decides they must move back to his home state of Wyoming for the summer, where his mother, Lucy, welcomes her orphaned grandchildren and her wounded son to her much loved but diminished ranch. From the perspective of each protagonist in turn, we watch shy Celia and handsome Cam, distraught Arthur and brave Lucy face themselves and their future in a Wyoming that is beautiful and consoling, yet beset by new threats of destruction.A split estate is a...

Publishers Weekly

Bacon's beautifully wrought, precisely observed and haunting latest follows a New York family struggling to survive a suicide. When Laura King jumps from the window of her Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, she leaves her husband, Arthur, and her teenage children, Cam and Celia, in emotional limbo. Seeking solace and a change of scene, Arthur takes the children cross-country to his mother, Lucy's, home in Callendar, Wyo. With pitch-perfect command of distinctive voices, Bacon (There Is Room for You; Last Geography) divides the narrative between Arthur, Celia and Cam, and Lucy King, all of whom feel guilt and anger about Laura's suicide. A major plot strand relates to the issue of mineral and drilling rights under the ranch land and gives the novel its title: each of the Kings strike out in self-destructive ways, related and unrelated to proposed methane wells, leading to a shocking denouement. Bacon captures the stark Wyoming landscape and Western ethos, and the power of buried secrets. She masterfully portrays complex family relationships in the wake of irrevocable damage. (Feb.)

Charlotte Bacon is the award-winning author of There Is Room for You (FSG, 2004) and Lost Geography (FSG, 2000). She lives in Bali with her husband and two children.