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Staff Pick
Freebird is a tightly packed and expertly written novel, both highly contemporary and wisely historical. It follows three generations of the Singer family as they navigate their increasingly chaotic lives. You will laugh with them, cry with them, and miss them when they're gone. Recommended By Moses M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A page-turning new novel from the author of Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award.
The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city's wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne's teenage son, Aaron, can't decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of the Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family's moral character to the core.
Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history
Review
"Freebird is such a timely book, considering the current deep divisions between right and left. A new classic for the collapsing political landscape of America." Kim Gordon, author of Girl in a Band
Review
"Jon Raymond’s wonderful new book Freebird poetically wrestles with the big and the small: how globalization and international conflicts reconcile with the personal; how the amorality of war affects individual psyches; how impulsive post adolescence mirrors impulsive old age. And the undercurrent of this increasingly suspenseful story is a fascinating discussion of environmental mutilation, at once a tangle of benign bureaucracy and calculated avarice, which Raymond tackles with equal parts sensitivity and expertise." Jesse Eisenberg, author of Bream Gives Me Hiccups
Review
"Freebird is the absorbing story of an American family steeped in a shared history of violence, written with great sensitivity, insight, and verve." Patrick DeWitt, author of Undermajordomo Minor
Review
"This is a powerful and tender family drama." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Jon Raymond is the author of two novels, Rain Dragon and The Half-Life, and the short-story collection Livability. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Village Voice, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.