Heroic Measures: A Novel

From the author ofThe Tattoo Artist("Beautifully written"Alice Sebold; "Boldly conceived"The New York Times Book Review), a new noveltaut, moving, accomplishedset in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert. A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown. This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story. In shifting points of viewAlex's, Ruth's, and the little dog'sman, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers. A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety.

A Manhattan couple hosting an open house to sell their apartment experience even more stress, chaos, and confusion when they also have to rush their beloved dachshund to the vet in the middle of what may be a terrorist attack.

New York City is on high alert--a gasoline truck is stuck in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled. Through panic and gridlock, Alex and Ruth must transport their beloved olddachshund--whose back legs are suddenly paralyzed--to the animal hospital, using a cutting board as a stretcher. But this is also the weekend when Alex and Ruth must sell the apartment in whichthey have lived for most of their adult lives. Over the course of forty-eight hours, as the mystery of the missing truck driver terrorizes the city and the dachshund's life hangs in the balance, the bidding warover their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair. Told in shifting points of view--Alex's, Ruth's, and the little dog's--HeroicMeasures is a moving, deft novel about urban anxiety and the love that deepens over years.

From the Trade Paperback edition.