The Most, Jessica Anthony
The Most, Jessica Anthony
4 Rating(s)
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
Club: $9.49

The Most

Author: Jessica Anthony

Narrator: Abigail Reno

Unabridged: 3 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/30/2024


Synopsis

From “one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page” (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.
 
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.
 
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.
 

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on November 03, 2024

to be honest...getting in the pool and then refusing to come out sounds like a lot of my childhood. although being a washed up tennis star housewife on both sides of an affair is less familiar. this book is uniquely confusing — not because it's about a woman refusing to get out of a pool (normal, rela......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on September 17, 2024

Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for fiction, “The Most” is a tightly constructed story about the implosion of a 1950’s marriage. Author Jessica Anthony writes a novella that encompasses 10 hours on an unusually warm November day. Kathleen Beckett has reached her limit of her troubled and......more

Goodreads review by Jillian on July 30, 2024

Pristine mid-century Americana vibes! 1950s housewife Kathleen stays home from church one day, saying she feels unwell. When her husband, Virgil, returns home, she is in their apartment complex’s pool and refuses to get out. The story takes place over the course of a single day, but as we unravel wh......more

Goodreads review by Flo on September 22, 2024

Don't pretend you're writing a novel and then end it like a short story, because it doesn't work that way.I imagine there are many failed novels out there exactly like this one. They start off well, but the author doesn't have the endurance, so they are either finished quickly or abandoned. The surp......more

Goodreads review by Karen on December 09, 2024

The story unfolds on an unseasonably warm Sunday in November and it is an account of a crucial point in the married life of a young couple in 1950’s Delaware. Kathleen and Virgil both have made many mistakes in their relationship.. on this day, Kathleen puts on a bathing suit and stays in their apart......more


Quotes

“Jessica Anthony’s The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing. The novel captures a haunting unrest at the core of midcentury American life, treating its aimlessly striving characters with a stern caress of grace. The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting.”—ISLE MCELROY, author of PEOPLE COLLIDE

“With Enter the Aardvark Jessica Anthony proved herself to be one of the most inventive writers working today. That book should have prepared me for her ingenious new novella, The Most, but somehow it didn’t. Trust me, though. The Most is a must.”—RICHARD RUSSO, author of EMPIRE FALLS and the NORTH BATH Trilogy