Returns and Exchanges

“This is the novel I’ve been missing: a sprawling, emotional and true family saga. I picked it up knowing nothing about it and fell completely in love with the characters, the story, the setting. All of it. It’s damn near perfect.”—Ayelet Waldman, New York Times bestselling author of Love & Treasure

“Wildly ambitious and deeply satisfying, Returns and Exchanges is a new kind of great American novel. Kayla Rae Whitaker deftly animates the ambitions and desires of a family on the rise, painting each character with a hard-eyed compassion that makes it impossible not to root for all of them, even as they break each other’s hearts again and again. This novel is smart, funny, loving, and utterly beautiful. I didn’t want it to end.”—Erin O. White, author of Like Family

“Whitaker has written a sprawling, extravagantly intelligent novel about people quietly breaking free from constraints—marital, gender, class. . . . Superb. Like a blue-collar Franzen novel.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Whitaker expertly juggles the expansive cast of characters and elicits sympathy for all of them even when they exhibit the worst parts of themselves. [Returns and Exchanges] is an openhearted epic of the American dream and the bargains struck to achieve it.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This singular story is timely and telling, distinctive and resonant, familiar and grand. It’s no small thing to craft a family saga that somehow feels new and ageless all at once, but Whitaker manages it with verve and grace.”—Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is

“Whitaker is one of contemporary fiction’s most astute, empathetic chroniclers of all the messy complexities that make us human. With a heart so strong you can hear it beat on the page, Returns and Exchanges deftly explores the price of ambition as one family grapples with the weight of its own success.”—Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding

“In Returns and Exchanges, the Baker-Taylors discover what it truly takes to build and preserve a legacy—not just in business, but in love. A tender, funny, and sharply observed story about the complicated promise of the American Dream and how to hold a family together.”—Heather Aimee O’Neill, author of The Irish Goodbye

“Ambitious and engrossing, a weekend read, written with sympathy, insight, humor, and style.”—Susan Rieger, author of Like Mother, Like Mother

“With engaging characters and immersive prose, Whitaker shows readers both an intimate family portrait and a lesson in the perils of greed, and by the book’s thoughtful, softly bittersweet ending, a commentary on humanity’s determination to make beauty despite society’s rejection of it.”—Booklist, starred review

“Deeply compelling . . . Hand to readers who have an interest in family stories, strong women, and lesbian and gay fiction.”—Library Journal, starred review