You or Someone Like You - Tapa blanda

This new novel questioning the merits of religion comes as a bit of a surprise from The New York Times perfume critic...but Burr has proved to be much more than a hack with a good sense of smell...Chandler Burr: Renaissance man. Who knew? --The Daily Beast

A true celebration of intellect...examines the personal decision each of us must make to run from, or embrace, our identity. --Publisher's Weekly

The highbrow humanist name-dropping book of the summer. --New York Magazine

At once an odyssey of classic literature and a heartbreakingly real portrait of a marriage as it unravels, YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU is the remarkable debut novel from the versatile genius of Chandler Burr, the nationally syndicated New York Times scent critic and author of The Perfect Scent and The Emperor of Scent.

It was a regular Los Angeles evening at one of the industry s favorite watering holes, when someone casually requested that Anne Rosenbaum, the English/American wife of Howard Rosenbaum, a big-deal studio executive, make a reading list. Anne is, after all, a PhD in literature, and is never without a book in her hands. Unexpectedly, Anne finds herself leading a high-level literary salon for Hollywood A-listers and then finds herself transformed into a major tastemaker and producer (reading about herself in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair). Swept up in an improbable moment of intellectual celebrity, and enjoying for the first time in her life the effect of publicly proclaiming her often very controversial opinions about literature, religion, race, and class, she fails to notice troubling changes in her thirty-year-old marriage to Howard, as well as significant signals from her teenaged son Sam.

While Sam s investigation into questions of identity rock Howard and Anne to their cores, Howard is leveled by a crisis of conscience that forces him to leave behind his wife, his son, and everything he loves. In a desperate attempt to communicate with a husband who has shut her out completely, Anne resorts to the book clubs, turning the gossipy channels of the Hollywood elite into a means to reach out to her isolated husband, and speak to him through the literature she has shared with the book clubs. Ultimately, she forsakes everything she has gained--fame, fortune, and newfound friendships--to bring back her husband and reunite her family.

In its very real and vibrant engagement with literature--Anne s reading list brings together everyone from Keats to Joyce to Mamet--YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU is reminiscent of David Denby s GREAT BOOKS; but in the hands of Chandler Burr, these books become the tender and tense strings that hold this family together through a singular and powerful crisis. Told in the winning voice of an unforgettable heroine, YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU is a captivating debut novel.