Winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel
In a small seaside city on the Jersey Shore, three half-siblings confront the death of a distant and bullying patriarch. They now have the chance to imagine new relationships and new futures, ones that would have been near-unthinkable while their father was alive.
Caught in their crossfire are the conservative religious communities that border Asbury Park, the longtime locals who have been pushed to the fringe by the shore’s revitalization, and the legendary town upon which the whole world seems to converge. Slowly, however, they come to understand that everything—their future, their happiness—depends on whether they can face themselves.
Wise, perceptive, and provocative, Greetings from Asbury Park is a remarkable literary debut in the tradition of great American novels such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It is a deep interrogation of place that depicts flawed characters as they break through to adulthood, truth, and to a moral relationship with the world.
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“The sphere of activity in Daniel H. Turtel’s Greetings from Asbury Park epitomizes character as place, vacillating along the New Jersey shore between Asbury Park, Deal Lake, and Long Branch, in a vivid and vibrantly described setting…Daniel H. Turtel artfully weaves multiple storylines centered on Asbury Park and stemming from the life of the duplicitous Joseph Larkin. Varying points of view amid clashing cultures are used throughout this modern-day, progressive story that reads like a sign of the times amid a dysfunctional family, whose hidden story is finally brought to light. Through the use of economic language and the power of a wildly engaging story, Greetings from Asbury Park explores existential questions such as right versus wrong; nature versus nurture; morality versus self-direction, and ultimately, to whom we are accountable. It’s a pithy, enjoyable, modern-day story from start to finish, with a cast of fully realized characters you’ll champion to the end.”
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New York Journal of Books