Book excerpt: "Good Company" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of the New York Times bestseller "The Nest," returns with a new novel about the profound joy – and heartache – of family and friends, "Good Company" (Ecco).
Read an excerpt below:
Flora wasn't looking for the ring when she found it. She was rooting around an old file cabinet in the garage, searching for a photograph from the summer Ruby was five, thirteen years ago. Long years? Short? Both, depending on how she thought about them. Flora had woken up thinking about the photo and she knew it had to be somewhere in the house. The photo had moved from the ugly brown refrigerator door in Greenwich Village to an even uglier brown refrigerator door in Los Angeles ("How do two people on opposite coasts whose houses we are eventually going to live in both choose brown refrigerators?" she'd asked Julian) until ugly refrigerator number two shuddered its last breath one August morning and they'd replaced it with a new one that was fancier and stainless steel and wouldn't hold a magnet. She'd moved the photo to a bulletin board in the small enclosed sun porch they called "the office," but the edges started to curl and so she'd put it in a drawer, safe from the ravages of time and the relentless attention of the California sun. She'd cleaned out all those drawers a couple of years ago, right after she got the part voicing Leona the saucy lioness on the animated show Griffith and they'd turned "the office" into "the studio," a place she could record her voice-over work at home when she wanted. Where had she put all the stuff from those drawers? She would never throw away a photograph, but especially not that one.
From "Good Company" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. Copyright 2021 Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint on HarperCollins.
For more info:
- "Good Company" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (Ecco), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available April 6 via Amazon and Indiebound
- Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
