Excerpt from On Turpentine Lane

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I picked up On Turpentine Lane by Elinor Lipman on a whim, not having read anything by Lipman before, and knowing next to nothing about the book. While the description and the book begin with the description of mysterious artifacts in the attic, it is not a murder mystery, but a romantic comedy. Not one of my usual genres. It had me laughing out loud a number of times. Elinor Lipman is definitely an author I would read again, and the narrator of the audiobook captured her voice exactly.

I gave it some time—accepting the new, softer, vegetarian Stuart 2.0. When friends heard about his walk and asked me if he was a nonconformist or a nut, I told them that this was just a new lifelong goal, to find himself by crossing the country on foot, a sabbatical of sorts after his agency had closed its doors.

Elinor Lipman, On Turpentine Lane

At thirty-two, Faith Frankel has returned to her claustro-suburban hometown, where she writes institutional thank-you notes for her alma mater. It’s a peaceful life, really, and surely with her recent purchase of a sweet bungalow on Turpentine Lane her life is finally on track. Never mind that her fiancé is off on a crowdfunded cross-country walk, too busy to return her texts (but not too busy to post photos of himself with a different woman in every state). And never mind her witless boss, or a mother who lives too close, or a philandering father who thinks he’s Chagall.

When she finds some mysterious artifacts in the attic of her new home, she wonders whether anything in her life is as it seems. What good fortune, then, that Faith has found a friend in affable, collegial Nick Franconi, officemate par excellence…

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