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A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis.
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis's girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is "known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good" (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
What are you reading this week? (6/26/025)
...n Myers. Someone somewhere recommended and I am so happy to find a copy at the library. Other pluses this past week - The Names by Florence Knapp and Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven.
-Evonne_Benedict
"Huneven is good at unlikable characters, making them fully three-dimensional while stopping far short of sappy redemption...A deeply satisfying novel; Huneven's best work to date." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is...Readers of Elizabeth Strout or Mary Gaitskill will love this book. Huneven hits it out of the ballpark again." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Readers will be charmed by a sense of nostalgia and interdependence that speaks to the best in humanity. Fans of Anne Tyler will enjoy Huneven's strong sense of place, quirky menagerie of characters, and the intriguing, relevant issues the Samuelson family navigates through chapters of their life together." —Booklist (starred review)
"Huneven succeeds at sketching the ways a family is shaped by trauma, but she maintains a fuzzy distance from the characters while shuttling through time, as if flipping through a yellowed photo album. This one leaves readers wanting more." —Publishers Weekly
"Michelle Huneven is such an elegant, watchful writer, and she has immense love and compassion for her characters. This is a novel that lays bare the tenderness of the world, exploring its breadth and smallness at once. I adored it." —Claire Lombardo, author of Same as it Ever Was
"Bug Hollow is a deeply immersive novel about a middle class, Californian family, with its closely held secrets, loves and tragedy. With the breadth of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles and the intimate ironic pleasures of Barbara Pym, Huneven spans the American century and at the center is a mysterious woman; brilliant, mean, held back by her time, harsh, and beloved. I couldn't put it down." —Mona Simpson, author of Commitment
This information about Bug Hollow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, and Search. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her master's in fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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