Unleashed: A Novel

By award-winning author Cai Emmons, an ambitious and transcendent novel set against the backdrop of California’s wildfire season in which a family in crisis is thrust on a collision course with the world around them that has an outcome beyond their wildest imaginings.

When Lu and George Barnes drop their only daughter, Pippa, off at college, they return to their Sonoma, California, home to face a marriage eroded beyond recognition. Without the camouflage of her beloved daughter, Lu finds herself unsure of who she is as a wife and a woman, increasingly disinterested in her husband’s pretentious values. George, on the other hand, struggles to understand his wife’s aimlessness, as she retreats further and further into her own world.

Meanwhile Pippa, who has spent the past year shunning the intimacy she and her mother once shared in a desperate attempt to prove her independence, feels completely adrift in the bustle of L.A., even fearful, given the recent disappearances of women with no worldly explanation, which have been confounding the country. She finds comfort only in her beloved cat and new interest in her zoology class-and its professor.

While Lu and Pippa turn to the natural world in this moment of personal crisis, George clings more tightly than ever to the material life he’s built. But tensions outside the family are mounting as well-California’s wildfire season is swiftly approaching, and with it, a surprising reckoning that none of the Barneses can avoid.