A Perfect Arrangement

"Suzanne Berne has many gifts, among them the talent to describe with eloquence and empathy the fault line of her characters. There's an exotic beauty in Berne's natural world as well. In A Perfect Arrangement everyday life outdoors for the Cook - Goldmans is illuminated with the clarity and color of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Inside the house, Berne's beloved and flawed people struggle to make their way in love and work in the all too modern world." (Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and Disobedience)

"Who is 'authorized' to love us, to love our children, our work - finally, who deserves to share the bounty of our lives? Suzanne Berne examines many kinds of possession, parental, erotic, economic, even environmental, and dramatizes these very challenging questions with dead-on aim and just what A Crime in the Neighborhood led us to expect: a scrupulous, unsentimental sympathy beautifully served by the precision of her prose." (Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Before and After)

Praise for A Crime in the Neighborhood

"A remarkable first novel that captures the history of child-parent relations in the last quarter-century, from the adults' betrayal to the new generation's revenge." (The New York Times Book Review)

"A Crime in the Neighborhood resonates with those fragile necessities of life, keenly aware of the scent of newly mowed lawns and the dangers that might land on any one of them." (The Boston Globe)

"In this novel, Berne's first, the telling is an exciting and elegant as the story being told." (USA Today)