Sixteen-year-old Lucy Gold is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy's default parent for most of their lives, Charlotte has seen her youth marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy's dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.
Cruel Beautiful World examines the intricate, infinitesimal distance between seduction and love, loyalty and duty, chaos and control, as it explores what happens when you're responsible for things you cannot make right.
Set against a backdrop of peace, love, and the Manson murders, the novel is a reflection of the era: exuberant, defiant, and precarious all at once. And Caroline Leavitt isat her mesmerizing best in this haunting, nuanced portrait of love, sisters, and the impossible legacy of family. Caroline Leavitt is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow. Her essays and stories have been included in New York magazine, Psychology Today, More, Parenting, Redbook, and Salon. She's a book critic for People, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she teaches writing online at Stanford and UCLA. "Backdropped by the Vietnam War and the Manson murders, Cruel Beautiful World is a fast-moving page-turner about the naiveté of youth and the malignity of power. Leavitt explores with a keen eye the intersection of love, family, and the anxiety of an era."
-Lily King, author of Euphoria
"Tender and tragic, with a shooting star of hope, Leavitt's profound latest is about the connections of siblings, the mystery of love-first, last and dangerous-and the struggle to accept what can never be changed."
-Sara Gruen, author of At the Water's Edge
"With Cruel Beautiful World, Caroline Leavitt has done the seemingly impossible: she's written a gorgeous, seductive novel that is also terrifying and pulse-pounding. This is the kind of coming-of-age novel for which readers yearn: we witness the emotional and spiritual evolution a sixteen-year-old girl while American society, in the early 1970s, seems to devolve all around her. Like the era it represents, Cruel Beautiful World is at times hopeful and nihilistic, beautiful and savage, mesmerizing and dangerous."
-Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy
"Two sisters - impulsive Lucy and sensible Charlotte - make decisions that will haunt the rest of their lives. Set in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, Cruel Beautiful World is a riveting novel about love and loss, secrets and lies, and what it means to be a family. Its twists and turns will keep you reading late into the night."
-Christina Baker-Kline, author of Orphan Train
"Nuanced and engrossing."
-People Magazine
"The war in Vietnam, the Charles Manson murder trial and other touchstones of that era provide the backdrop for Cruel Beautiful World, Caroline Leavitt's moving novel about three women connected by fate and a spate of tragic deaths. As in her other novels, including Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow, Leavitt expertly draws us into the stormy lives of her female characters and deftly narrates their coming-of-age in a world in which women's roles are changing."
-The Washington Post
"The author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You once again skillfully animates themes of disappearance, abandonment and loss. With Cruel Beautiful World, Leavitt successfully reminds the reader of the ephemeral and lifelong nature of sisterly love, and how it always leaves behind a certain kind of sadness and beauty."
-The San Francisco Chronicle
"Riveting."
-Marie Claire
"From its first sentence, Carol
