The Last Romantics

Fiona Skinner is a renowned poet, and when an audience asks where her best-known work, The Love Poem, came from, she answers with a story about her family. It starts in a big yellow house in a middle-class Connecticut town, with a funeral, an iron poker and a stretch of time the children come to call the Pause.

The Pause is a free and feral summer. The four Skinner siblings are caught between the ordinary life they had and an uncertain future: Renee is fierce, Caroline sensitive, Joe the golden boy, and Fiona the watchful one. They come out of that summer fiercely loyal and closely bound to one another.

Two decades later, a new family crisis tests those bonds. The siblings have to question the choices they have made as adults and decide what they are willing to do for love.

Literary family fiction, told as the story of one American family across decades and framed by Fiona's account of her own work. The scope is wide, but the focus stays close on the siblings.

The book follows the duties they accept and the ones they resent, and how people lose and sometimes recover those they love. Stories help them understand the past and face what comes next.