Matthew Grzbc is just your average newly divorced dad. He shares custody of his six-year-old daughter. He may still be in love with his ex-wife. He believes he probably doesn’t deserve his sexy, successful, driven girlfriend. And he plays the harp—that’s his job.
When his father dies unexpectedly (he has a heart attack while listening to a meditation CD), Matt is forced to confront his own mortality and the fleeting nature of life—he questions everything, from his romantic attachments to his professional aspirations.
When he earns an audition for the principle harp chair in a first-rate orchestra—just the kind of life-changing development he could use right now—he is poised to seize the opportunity…but then his ex-wife gets engaged, his girlfriend grows distant, his daughter seems to be having the 6-year-old version of an emotional breakdown, he learns things about his father’s life that make him question everything he thought he knew about the man, and then…even his harp starts to betray him.
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“Charming…The painfully self-aware Matt has a great sense of humor, but his comic insights don’t help him much as he faces a confounding array of personal problems.…The pleasures of [Mozina’s] writing never flag.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Brilliant debut novel…Contrary Motion is a wonderful story—beautifully written, hilarious, tortured, and filled with heavenly music.”
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award finalist American SalvageBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Andy Mozina is a professor of English at Kalamazoo College and the author of the short story collections The Women Were Leaving the Men, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Quality Snacks, which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His fiction has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Tin House and McSweeney’s. He lives in Michigan with his wife and daughter.