A teenage boy is missing. His younger brother searches for him and in the process finds himself. A “haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic” (New York Times Book Review).

The Odd Sea

Literature & Fiction

Reiken, Frederick

United States

Mariner Books

The Lost Legends of New Jersey

Romeo and Juliet in northern New Jersey? Yiddish constellations in Asbury Park? A garbage dump in the Meadowlands that's filled with old musical instruments from a high school marching band? Love and sex, hockey and snorkeling, a family that is falling apart despite the best intentions-this is what Frederick Reiken has delivered in his brilliant second novel.But the real subject is true love, the one and only-known in Yiddish as b'shert. Anthony Rubin, the young protagonist, isn't sure whether he's found it with his neighbor, Juliette, daughter of a reputed Mafioso. His mother, who quits the family after her husband's affair with a neighbor, doesn't believe in true love at all. But his father does, and so does Anthony's grandpa, who meets the love of his life at 78. Reiken is known for creating characters you feel you've known all your life, for mapping landscapes with profound intimacy and wonder. The Lost Legends of New Jersey is a rich, resonant book, filled with joy as well as heartbreak, and the extraordinary magic that can arise within ordinary lives.

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

From the critically acclaimed author of The Odd Sea, a poignant and magical coming-of-age story that "deftly explores the mysteries of love and loss" (Time) It's the early 1980s and the suburban streets of New Jersey are filled with Bruce Springsteen-era teenagers searching for answers. Anthony Rubin is a rising high school hockey star faced with a family that is falling apart. His father has had an affair with Anthony's best friend's mother and his own mother has abandoned the family for Florida. Confronted with an overwhelming sense of loss, Anthony focuses on the one thing he feels he can save-the tough-talking daughter of a reputed Mafioso, a Juliet to his Romeo. Merging the commonplace and the mythological, Frederick Reiken's richly layered second novel presents unforgettable characters whose lives seem at once familiar and archetypal. Filled with joy as well as heartbreak, The Lost Legends of New Jersey is a rich, resonant tale of the extraordinary magic that can arise within ordinary lives.

Harvest Books

"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems in fact to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it. In DAY FOR NIGHT, critically acclaimed writer Frederick Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, and yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Day for Night: A Novel

Reagan Arthur Books

"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems in fact to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it. In Day For Night, critically acclaimed writer Frederick Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, and yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Reagan Arthur / Back Bay Books

“A haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic.”—The New York Times On a sunny spring morning, sixteen-year-old Ethan Shumway walks down his gravel driveway, turns the bend, and vanishes without a trace. As police search for clues, Ethan's devastated family and friends—from his parents and four siblings to the older woman who was more than a teacher to Ethan—grapple for answers in the teenager's enigmatic life. As this elusive mystery slowly weaves its way into the fabric of the family, Ethan's younger brother, Philip, becomes the last, most stubborn searcher of all: a boy caught between the power and fragility of youth, between the bonds and fissures of family, searching for understanding in the unbearable presence of loss. Praise for The Odd Sea “A powerful debut novel.”—People “[An] extraordinarily good first novel . . . The story has a dark, dreamlike quality, and author Reiken tells it with no melodrama nor any word out of place.”—Time “A luminous parable about growing up, about the necessity of dealing with inevitable loss and questions that cannot be answered . . . Reiken is a smoothly seductive storyteller. He has talent for telling but not telling, for revealing only enough information to whet our appetite.”—Newsday

The Odd Sea: A Novel

Literary

Delta

"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems, in fact, to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it. In Day for Night, critically acclaimed writer Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Day for Night: A Novel, Library Edition

Tantor Media, Inc.

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Books by Reiken, Frederick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reiken, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Odd Sea

The Lost Legends of New Jersey

The Lost Legends of New Jersey

Day for Night: A Novel

Day for Night: A Novel

The Odd Sea: A Novel

Day for Night: A Novel, Library Edition