His Family

Roger Gale is sixty years old, a New York widower watching the city and his family transform around him. His three daughters have become strangers in some essential way: Edith, exhausted by motherhood; Deborah, burning with social convictions that bewilder him; Laura, young and incandescent, about to marry a man Roger barely knows. As the city hums with change in 1917, Roger sits in his rooms, playing chess with Edith, and wonders when he became an observer in his own life rather than its author. The novel won the first Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, and it earns that distinction by doing something quietly radical: it tells a father's story through the women who surround him, revealing how little we truly know even those we love most. Poole captures a specific historical moment when old ways were crumbling, when women were claiming new freedoms, and when a man of a certain generation had to reckon with the fact that his era was ending. It's a family portrait that is also a small tragedy of time passing.