The Loved Ones

Book excerpt: A novel of a wealthy family in midcentury America and the flaws beneath the surface, from “a writer of dexterity and imagination.” (New York Times Book Review). As the 1960s draw to a close, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father Nick is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy. As Nick’s older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cutthroat world of the cosmetics industry, the Devlin family, fragmented by betrayals, will become victims of the cruelest kind of hurt. “Mary-Beth Hughes's body of work casts a dreamy, hypnotic effect, even while slyly exposing the risks and rewards of love and its devastations among the upper class.”—Elle “There’s a lot of smoking, bourbon, bangs and center parts. People have live-in help with whom they play bridge. But the book glosses these details lightly; to the extent it is a period piece, it is in the way it summons a now somewhat dated idea of luxury, ambition and, by extension, accomplishment... it amazes me how many of the book’s images have stayed with me.”—The New York Times Book Review “Hughes is a quietly devastating writer, reminiscent of Evan S. Connell and James Salter in her delicate, almost surgical ability to peel back the thin skin of normal life and to lay bare our painful truths, contradictions, the stains of grief and betrayal...a beautiful, haunting novel.”—A.M. Homes