The Misfortune of Marion Palm: A novel

Authors: Culliton, Emily
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
BISAC/Subject: FIC044000, FIC016000, FIC045000
ISBN: 9781524731915, Related ISBNs: 0525432620, 0525500553, 0525500561, 1524731900, 1524731919
Classification: Non-Fiction
Number of pages: 304,
Audience: General/trade
Synopsis: A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house. Told from the points of view of Nathan, Marion's husband, heir to a long-diminished family fortune; Ginny, Marion's teenage daughter who falls helplessly in love at the slightest provocation; Jane, Marion's youngest who is obsessed with a missing person of her own; and Marion herself, on the lam--and hiding in plain sight.
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