By: Lee Cole
ISBN: 9780593802861
Publisher: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf
Publication Date: 06/17/2025
Format: Hardcocver
My Rating: TBR (ARC)
Set in Paducah, Kentucky, Lee Cole’s follow-up to Groundskeeping (“An exacting, beautifully textured debut novel . . . presages a major career”—The New York Times Book Review) is a powerful, page-turning story of two half brothers navigating the complexities of class and privilege in the American South.
Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger sibling Emmett, paralyzed by indecision and working on a factory assembly line—who find themselves at their family home in Kentucky and upend each other’s lives in devasting ways.
Between them is Alice, Joel's wife, a wry, passionate young woman who is being slowly asphyxiated by domestic tedium, and whose longing collides with Emmett’s hunger for connection and desire to escape a sense of burgeoning failure and shame. As the chemistry between them escalates, the family is plunged into a violent crucible, each character brought to a precipice of immutable catastrophe.
Incisive, poignant, gorgeously written, Lee Cole has written a haunting novel about class, privilege, brotherhood, and the American South, a book that asks whether people can change, and at what cost, and what it takes to build a life of fulfillment and meaning.
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About the Author
Photo: © Ariel Katz
Lee Cole is the author of GROUNDSKEEPING (Knopf, March 2022). He was born and grew up in rural western Kentucky. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in New York. WEBSITE
Watch Jenna Bush Hager’s Candid Conversation With 'Groundskeeping' Author Lee Cole
