Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war. Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena -- with their children, Daisy and Ed -- try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same. Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.
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“What an unexpectedly brilliant read this is. It starts off all Stepford Wives and Valley of the Dolls and ends up somewhere in the territory of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History…This is an ambitious undertaking for a first novel but Klaussmann really pulls it off, turning an elegant period piece into a creepy psychological thriller. The characters are cruelly drawn and should be unsympathetic but there is something compelling about the setting and the cinematic feel of the book: you are drawn to these strange types without understanding why. There’s just the right mix of glamour and tension…A wonderfully clever, chilling summer read.”
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Independent (London)