
Bug Hollow
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Emily Rankin
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By:
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Michelle Huneven
About this listen
New York Times Summer Reading Pick • One of 50 books TODAY can't wait to read in 2025 • Oprah Daily Best Summer Reads of 2025 • One of LitHub's Novels to Read This Summer • Kirkus 20 Best Books to Read in June
“Deeply satisfying…Feels like watching a master painter at work.”—Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
©2022 Michelle Huneven (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
“Not another novel about family dysfunction, secrets and lies. Rather, Huneven’s bighearted family is bound together by the power of love, and doing right by each other. In that way, Bug Hollow is of a piece with Huneven’s previous work, in which seemingly incompatible characters reach out across social and cultural divides in a bid to grasp some measure of redemption and comity . . . taut and compressed.”—Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
“This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is . . . Readers of Elizabeth Strout or Mary Gaitskill will love this book. Huneven hits it out of the ballpark again.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“A gift: top-drawer fiction and a family story that speaks of the joys, sorrows, and surprising possibilities of human connection . . . Serendipitous meetings invite redos, showing the beauty of life’s circular nature. Readers will be charmed by a sense of nostalgia and interdependence that speaks to the best in humanity. Fans of Anne Tyler will enjoy Huneven’s strong sense of place, quirky menagerie of characters, and the intriguing, relevant issues the Samuelson family navigates through chapters of their life together.” —Booklist (starred review)
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