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Sign up todayThe Wanting Life
A Novel
Narrator
Donald Corren
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Length
9 hours 51 minutes
Language
English
Father Paul, a gay priest, reflects on his life while his sister and niece grapple with the life choices they’ve made.
Set in Rome, Cape Cod, and Wisconsin over the course of the summer of 2009 and in Rome during the spring of 1970, The Wanting Life tells the intertwined story of three members of the Novak family: Father Paul, a closeted gay Catholic priest who’s dying of cancer and has secrets he desperately wants to share; Britta, his self-destructive sister and caretaker, who’s struggling to find meaning in a world without her beloved husband; and Maura, Britta’s daughter—a thirty-nine-year-old artist who’s facing a choice between her husband and two children or the man she believes is her one, true love.
Featuring one of most unconventional love stories you’ll read this year, The Wanting Life is both a compulsively readable family drama about the toll that secrets and loyalty can take on us and a gorgeous meditation on the comforts (and limits) of faith and intimacy that calls to mind novels like Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending.
Mark Rader has had stories published in Glimmer Train, Epoch, and The Southern Review. He has been short-listed for an O. Henry Award, the Best American Non-Required Reading anthology, and a Pushcart Prize. He has an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University.
Donald Corren is a stage, television, and voice actor whose work has been featured on and off Broadway, in regional theaters, and behind animated characters. He was trained in the theater division of the Juilliard School.
Reviews
“Both quiet and deeply unsettling. A profound meditation on what we owe others and also ourselves, it balances the pleasure of getting to know a handful of vivid characters with the disconcerting awareness that their moral choices are, seeming by design, as impossible as our own.”
“With indelible images, exquisite emotional nuance, and genuine wisdom, Rader explores faith, regret, shame, fear, and, most of all, love.”
“A cross-generational novel focused on happiness, fulfillment, and love…a novel whose leads are unafraid to explore the complicated territory of human desire.”
“Readers will be touched by the portrait of Paul’s rich interior life. Fans of The Great Believers will appreciate this story of heartfelt empathy.”
“Rader’s poignant debut novel explores the emotional costs of seeking and sacrificing romantic love…An insightful and compassionate family drama about desire, love, and the courage it takes to live a full life.”
“Deeply complex and compulsively readable, this multi-generational story interrogates desire, truth, and what it means to lead a full life, in ways that are eternally urgent.”
“Beautiful, suspenseful, and ultimately hopeful.”
“Every life is a love story, this book reminds us, and at every stage there’s a chance for a different future. I loved it.”
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