The Shadow of Desire — Rebecca Stowe

Ginger Moore is our guide in this closely observed, wickedly funny novel. She is a thirty-eight-year-old academic and biographer of obscure women long since dead, who had talent but never lived up to their abilities and she has quietly made her name from these books. She is also involved with a comedian who uses her as a character in his act ("I go to bed with my girlfriend . . . and wake up with Alistair Cooke"). She is on her annual Christmas trip home to a family whose tradition is watching Psycho together. During this stay, she will finally understand the lives of her own family and the incident that led to their inward collapses.