Swell: A Novel

Summary

When Sue Glassman’s family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue’s father-in-law, Sy, buys the family—Sue, Dan, and their two daughters—a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans’ cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.

On the weekend of Sue’s conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim—formerly Timmy, a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic—who feels, for reasons even he can’t explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.

The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose’s return swells to operatic heights in an audiobook that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.