A Most Anticipated title from: Buzzfeed * BookRiot * LitHub * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping* Kirkus
A Best Fall Book Title from: People * Entertainment Weekly * Buzzfeed * Vogue * Vulture * Bustle * New York Post * Nylon * Bust * USA Today * The Observer * PopSugar * Newsday * Woman’s Day * St. Louis Dispatch
“All This Could Be Yours is an engaging portrait of the unshakable connection of family.”
—Vogue
“Complicated families are Attenberg’s speciality, and she more than delivers on that premise here.”
—Buzzfeed
“Versatile, earthbound, and unforgiving, the novelist returns to the comic blend of messy family drama that made The Middlesteins such a smart best seller. This time, the madness swirls around the (sort of) grown children of the dying Victor, a tyrannical and very shady real-estate developer.”—Boris Kachka, Vulture
“Nobody writes family drama quite like Jami Attenberg, and her latest novel is a dark, deliciously captivating look into the way a toxic patriarch can poison everyone around him. There are no easy resolutions offered here, but that's as it should be.”
—Nylon
“It wouldn’t be a Jami Attenberg novel without a difficult family at its center. The New Orleans-set All This Could Be Yours spins secrets and resentments in its portrait of a strong-willed lawyer who returns home to contend with the legacy of her abusive, dying father.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“All This Could Be Yours…is glorious. It’s dark, sexy, mordant and the characters are deeply flawed yet relatable in that ‘drag me’ way. It’s set in New Orleans and while Jami’s writing is sparkling and lucid, the muggy heat of the backdrop lends an air of sultry wooziness that evokes day drinking and other amazing decisions. This book captures the intolerable loneliness and occasional futility of loving your family. All This Could Be Yours makes you want to call your mom, get salty when she doesn’t pick up and then let her call go to voicemail when she rings you back."—Mary H.K. Choi, Bustle
“A deep dive into the darker side of family bonds, All This Could Be Yours is another compulsively readable novel by Jami Attenberg. In what feels like a rebuke to late capitalism, Attenberg refuses to find charm or redemption in the ugliness of greed. Her first book set in New Orleans, the novel casts a stark contrast between this family of outsiders and the native residents whose lives intersect with the Tuchmans. This is a parable for our times.”
—The Observer
“Novelist Jami Attenberg writes fascinating, complicated characters, and All This Could Be Yours connects a villainous old man on his deathbed with others you’ll instantly care about. Despite the short time span, this story covers a lot of ground…a rich account of what folks have done, remembered, and regretted. Attenberg’s writing is funny and true, her observations bone-deep and nonjudgmental.”
—Bust
“In this darkly hilarious family drama, an abusive patriarch is on his deathbed in New Orleans, and his daughter is determined to mine her distant mother for secrets.”
—NY Post
“A richly drawn pleasure.” —People Magazine
“Dazzling . . . A delectable family saga.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The novel takes place in one very long day but encompasses the entirety of lifetimes…Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg, poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive. Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Attenberg writes with a deeply human understanding of her characters, and the fact that, when it comes to family, things are rarely well enough to leave alone.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Jami Attenberg always creates characters that feel so real you can almost touch them, and in All This Could Be Yours, she does it again. With their patriarch on his death bed, the family of Victor Tuchman gathers to say their goodbyes and figure out why he was the way he was. (And why they are the way they are.) Thoughtful and smart, All This Could Be Yours is a novel that begs to be discussed.”
—Popsugar, “Best 2019 Fall Books for Women”
“An ambitious and utterly delectable novel about families and their secrets that opens up, pleasurably, like a set of nesting dolls."—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
“Jami Attenberg's work is so deeply attuned to humans and our imperfect attempts to love each other. All This Could Be Yours is populated by Attenberg's pitch-perfect characters; flawed, recognizable people dealing with big topics--death, family, sex, love--and Attenberg handles it all with an expert touch and a keen sense of what, despite all the sadness and secrets, keeps people connected, striving for moments of beauty and tenderness in a dark world.”
—Emma Cline, author of The Girls
“Set against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans, Jami Attenberg’s extraordinary new novel All This Could Be Yours is a deep dive into fractured family dynamics. In alternating voices, Attenberg expertly weaves together a chorus of love, betrayal and inheritance, each chapter a prism turned, revealing a new spectrum of secrets. Interspersed are gorgeous excavations into fleeting moments with strangers—the checkout clerks and ferry conductors passing through our lives—connecting this singular family into the larger web of life, where everyone is worthy of understanding and no one is without a soul.”
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
“Attenberg crafts families with stunning nuance and depth. She pays tribute to unseen New Orleans with a gaze on the powerful and the downtrodden. Her characters are unforgettable, their predicaments are captivating and their journeys shed light on the inner workings of America.”
—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of A Kind of Freedom
“Jami Attenberg writes with an unflinching and generous spirit that brings to mind Grace Paley. All This Could Be Yours traces the lasting turmoil of a flawed marriage, and is another marvel of intelligence, humor, and soul.”
—Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance and Sway
"No one understands the contradictions of the human heart and how our grace and our failures reverberate through our families better than Jami Attenberg. And no one writes about our grace and failures with humor and compassion better than her either. Also—this book’s structure is brilliant."
—Attica Locke, author of Heaven, My Home
“An engrossing story.”—AARP, “Favorite Fiction Books for Fall”
“Attenberg peels back the layers of each character until it feels like you have known this family your whole life.”
—Alma, “Favorite Books for Fall”
About the Author
JAMI ATTENBERG is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up. She has contributed essays to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, and Longreads, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing. Not much space for it in the new home, just a few rooms lined up in a row, underneath a series of slow-moving ceiling fans, an array of antique clocks ticking on one wall. He made it from one end of the apartment to the other in no time at all'his speed a failure as much as it was a success'then it was back to the beginning, flipping on his heel, grinding himself against the floor, the earth, this world.
The pacing came after the cigar and the Scotch. Both had been unsatisfactory. The bottle of Scotch had been sitting too close to the window for months, and the afternoon sun had destroyed it, a fact he had only now just realized, the flavor of the Scotch so bitter he had to spit it out. And he had coughed his way through his cigar, the smoke tonight tickling his throat vindictively. All the things he loved to do, smoking, drinking, walking off his frustrations, those pleasures were gone. He'd been at the casino earlier, hanging with the young bucks. Trying to keep up with them. But even then, he'd blown through that pleasure fast. A thousand bucks gone, a visit to the bathroom stall. What was the point of it? He had so little left to give him joy, or the approximation of it. Release, that was always how he had thought of it. A release from the grip of life.
His wife, Barbra, sat on the couch, her posture tepid, shoulders loose, head slouched, no acknowledgment of his existence. But she glanced at him now as he paused in front of her, and then she dropped her head back down again. Her hair dyed black, chin limping slightly into her neck, but still, at sixty-eight years old, as petite and wide-eyed as ever. Once she had been the grand prize. He had won her, he thought, like a stuffed animal at a sideshow alley. She flipped through an Architectural Digest. Those days are gone, sweetheart, he thought. Those objects are unavailable to you. Their lives had become a disgrace.
Now would have been an excellent time to admit he had been wrong all those years, to confess his missteps in full, to apologize for his actions. To whom? To her. To his children. To the rest of them. This would have been the precise moment to acknowledge the crimes of his life that had put them in that exact location. His flaws hovered and rotated, kaleidoscope-like, in front of his gaze, multicolored, living, breathing shards of guilt in motion. If only he could put together the bits and pieces into a larger vision, to create an understanding of his choices, how he had landed on the wrong side, perhaps always had. And always would.
Instead he was angry about the taste of a bottle of Scotch, and suggested to his wife that if she kept a better home, none of this would have happened, and also would she please stop fucking around with the thermostat and leave the temperature just as he liked. And she had flipped another page, bored with his Scotch, bored with his complaints.
'the guy downstairs said something again," she said. "About this.' She motioned to his legs. The pacing, they could hear it through the floor.
'I can walk in my own home," he said.
'sure," she said. 'maybe don't do it so late at night, though."
He marched into their bedroom, stomping loudly, and plummeted headfirst onto their bed. Nobody loves me, he thought. Not that I care. He had believed, briefly, he could find love again, even now, as an old man, but he had been wrong. Loveless, fine, he thought. He closed his eyes and allowed himself one last series of thoughts: a beach, sand bleached an impenetrable white, a motionless blue sky, the sound of birds nearby, a thigh, his finger running along it. No one's thigh in particular. Just whatever was available from a pool of bodies in his memory. His imaginary hand squeezed the imaginary thigh. It was meant to cause pain. He waited for his moment of arousal, but instead he began to gasp for air. His heart seized. Release me, he thought. But he couldn't move, face-down in the pillow, a muffled noise. A freshly laundered scent. A field of lavender, the liquid cool color of the flower, interrupted by bright spasms of green. Release me. Those days are over.
Ninety minutes later an EMS worker named Corey responded to his last call of the day. The Garden District. A heart attack, seventy-three-year-old male.
