If You Left

Ashley Prentice Norton

Jun 2016 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Christina Delaine

About this audiobook

For most of their marriage, Althea has fluctuated between extreme depressive and manic states, and Oliver has been the steady hand that guided her to safety. This summer, Althea decides that she will be different from here on. She will be the loving, sexy wife Oliver wants, and the reliable, affectionate mother their nine-year-old daughter Clem deserves. Her plan: to bring Clem to their Easthampton home once school is out-with no "summer girl" to care for her this time-and become "normal." But Oliver is distant and controlling, and his relationship with their interior decorator seems a bit too close; Clem has learned to be self-sufficient, and getting to know her now feels like very hard work for Althea. Into this scene enters the much younger, David Foster Wallace-reading house painter, who reaches something in Althea that has been long buried. Fearless and darkly funny, If You Left explores the complex dance that is the bipolar marriage, and the possibility that to move forward, we might have to destroy the very things we've worked hardest to build.

About the author

Ashley Prentice Norton is a graduate of Exeter, Georgetown, and the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Chocolate Money, was heralded as "darkly funny... compulsively readable" by People. She lives in New York with her husband and three children.

Christina Delaine is a SOVAS Voice Arts Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator who has recorded over 100 audiobooks. She is also an Audie Award nominee. An accomplished stage and voice actor, Delaine has appeared on stages across the country and has voiced scores of commercials and video games.