The unfortunates - Sophie McManus

CeCe Somner, an eccentric heiress once known for her cruel wit as much as for her tremendous generosity, now faces opulent decline. Afflicted with a rare disease and touched by mortality for the first time, her gilded, bygone values collide with an unforgiving present. As her troubled, spoiled son George and his outsider wife Iris struggle to resolve mounting financial and familiar troubles, Cece must face the Somner dynasty's dark legacy. But when George's secrets culminate in an unexpected crime, no riches can put things right for the unfortunate Somners. What will become of all three, who must learn what life will be like beyond the long, shimmering shadow cast by the family's past?

Sophie McManus grew up in New York City and attended Vassar College and Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Saltonstall Foundation and the Jentel Foundation. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction and Tin House, among other publications. She teaches writing in Brooklyn, New York. The Unfortunates is her first novel.

Sophie McManus, whose writing reminds me of Anne Tyler or Jonathan Franzen ... shows us the world through the cloudy lens of the truly moneyed, and gives us a riveting sense that something horrible is about to happen to these people. She corrals our prurience beautifully.
Evening Standard

McManus renders her opulent protagonists sympathetic by investigating their family 'values' with wit and generosity
Daily Mail

A very sharp novel
Evening Standard, Books of the Year

McManus, with her intricate re-creation of CeCe's regal life, hearkens to an earlier artist far less frequently invoked: Edith Wharton . . . some of the funniest writing I've read in years: Martin Amis funny; wheezing, choke-on-your-laughter funny. After reading so many comic novels that eventually shatter in brittle cynicism or evaporate in gassy sentimentality, I moved through The Unfortunates with a slowly accruing sense of awe as these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
Washington Post

McManus, with her intricate re-creation of CeCe's regal life, hearkens to an earlier artist far less frequently invoked: Edith Wharton . . . some of the funniest writing I've read in years: Martin Amis funny; wheezing, choke-on-your-laughter funny. After reading so many comic novels that eventually shatter in brittle cynicism or evaporate in gassy sentimentality, I moved through The Unfortunates with a slowly accruing sense of awe as these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
Washington Post