Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney: The Nest, 9780062666420, Harper Collins, paperbackGerman edition: Das Nest, Klett Cotta, 9783608980004, hardback 

Right up front:  I greatly enjoyed “The Nest”, got sucked in from the very beginning. This is such a cleverly constructed novel, it is hard to stop reading it is so intoxicating, you just want to find out what happens next to all the Plumbs.  Full of gossip, very funny at times but serious and dark in other parts, a very New Yorkish family portrait in my opinion. 

The four Plumb siblings try hard to hide their less than perfect lives from each other, desperately waiting for their trust fund to bail them out once Melody reaches the age of 40 to ease some of their severe financial strains.

Leo, the notoriously bad boy of the family with a trophy wife who is about to divorce him, has been freshly released from rehab and is summoned to a lunch with his three other siblings Melody, Beatrice and Jack. To their horror the Plumb siblings were informed that their sacred trust fund was slashed into by their mother to bail out Leo from a disastrous car accident with a nineteen year old waitress while driving intoxicated filled to the brim with alcohol and coke.  A seriously smaller payout would be a disaster to them all.  What plans does Leo have to repay his siblings?   Melody has college tuitions at a private university for her twins coming up and a mortgage the family budget can no longer handle. Jack’s antique business isn’t what he has led his partner Walker to believe secretly borrowing against their summer cottage and Beatrice is a former writer with a decade long writers block wasting away as an editor at a New York literary magazine on a ridiculous salary. 

I will not reveal how this clever, witty story unfolds, but I could hardly believe this is D’Aprix Sweeney’s debut novel it is so masterfully constructed. I loved her fluent style of writing, her sharp sense of humor and how all the characters become part of your life as you keep wondering what’s next.  The book fully deserves to be in the bestseller lists, the German edition, also called “Das Nest” came out early in 2017 and is available.