The Peaceable Kingdom Stories

Francine Prose, widely praised as ‘one of the most astute observers of American ways, ‘ in this new collection of stories once again displays the keen wit, ironic insight, and unsentimental compassion that have won her the praise of readers and critics alike. Hailed as ‘social satire at its slyest and best, ‘ her fiction has been described as ‘hilarious and shocking, ‘ ‘relentless and scathingly perceptive, ‘ and ‘as graceful as it is wrenching.’ The inhabitants of Prose’s peaceable kingdom are getting the surprises of their lives. The things they thought they’d wanted — marriage and children, travel, work — even the compromises they imagined they’d made, no longer sustain them. A young woman on her Italian honeymoon suddenly realizes that her high-minded ecologist husband will have to save the world without her. A child on a class trip recognizes in the friezes of an Egyptian tomb the inevitable, tragic procession of her life to come. A teenager has a rude awakening when she is pursued to Paris by the boy of her dreams. Nothing is dependable in this world where weddings and birthday parties go unpredictably, awry, strangers blurt out disturbing confessions, and even the family pets reveal themselves to be agents of discord and disruption — and where the seemingly tranquil surface of ordinary happiness barely conceals the darker, more mysterious and brutal truth about this deceptively peaceable kingdom.