count the ways
Paperback Available Now!
BOOK CLUBS!
If you would like me to join your Zoom meeting, please send a note to my assistant, Gina Alligood, at lifebythelakewithjoyce@gmail.com. (As schedules allow.)
Joyce Maynard’s NEWEST NOVEL (her tenth), is ON SALE NOW.
In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives
Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children - two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.
Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.
A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.
“Occasionally I read a book I can’t stop talking or thinking about. Joyce Maynard’s Count the Ways is one of those books. It is—quite simply—the best book I’ve read so far in 2021.” - Sarah Gelman, Editorial Director, Amazon Books
HEAR JOYCE INTERVIEWED AND READING FROM COUNT THE WAYS:
REVIEWS
"How did Maynard know that this is exactly the novel we all need now? Yes, it's a page-turning thriller and the characters are all so alive they breathe on the page, but there's something even grander going on here. Her exhilaratingly brilliant new novel isn't just an indelible story of the falling dominoes of a family struggling through crisis and through generations, it's also about the times we live through, from the draft to Aids to #MeToo and more. And, being Joyce, she gets at the heart of the most basic and important and beautiful of questions: What binds us together and what tears us apart, and how we can know the difference? How does love survive? This gorgeous story reminds us how, and that love is always, always worth it.”
- Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You
"Count the Ways is an extraordinarily generous invitation into a woman's intimate life, from the loneliness of her youth to the earned wisdom of middle age. In this richly imagined novel, Maynard never flinches as she portrays both quiet successes and heartbreaking failures at love, marriage, and motherhood. This is the work of one of our great storytellers."
- Meredith Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Beneficence
STARRED REVIEW
"The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all...Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with.”~Kirkus Reviews
ALSO AVAILABLE AT THESE RETAILERS
