The Most

Nothing causes a stir quite like a woman who veers from her expected place. Jessica Anthony’s fourth novel, The Most, takes place over a tense, unusually warm November day in 1957, when housewife and mother Kathleen Beckett takes a dip in her apartment complex’s typically deserted pool. Her husband Virgil wants to get to the golf course on the rare 70-degree day and needs her to look after their sons. But Kathleen refuses to leave—not because she wants to inconvenience Virgil or ignore their kids, but because the couple is clumsily keeping secrets from each other and Kathleen can’t take it anymore. In the pool, she reflects on the past to figure out how to reclaim her life. Anthony’s domestic drama closely examines the makings of a certain kind of mid-century American couple and what happens when one half of that pair decides that everything must change.

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