To awkward 15-year-old Abby Schecter, the “living room” — that is, the area where she spends the most time experiencing memorable things — is an assemblage of tables and a couch beneath a canopy of trees behind her high school, where rebellious adolescents sneak smokes or bask in the reflection of cooler, more popular kids. To her mother, Livia, the living room is anywhere she can secretly binge on food away from the judgment of observers, most notably her husband, Jeffrey, a lawyer whose chief emotion toward her is “worry.” And to Jeffrey’s increasingly senile mother, Headie, the living room is the floor of her apartment, where she willingly spends most of her days reminiscing about her two dead husbands. “Headie began crawling a few weeks earlier. It suddenly occurred to her when she was down on the floor trying to pick up a piece of lint. Why get up only to sit back down? She wondered why she had never thought of this before.” With perfect pacing, Sherman rotates the action among Abby, her mother and her grandmother, emphasizing the loneliness and secrecy that pervades three generations of women, as well as the fear that a revelation of secrets will make their spaces more cramped and uncomfortable, less suitable for living.

-Cameron Martin, New York Times Book Review

As she demonstrated in “The First Hurt,” a memorable — and truly disturbing — collection of stories, Sherman is a writer attuned to grotesqueries of daily life. Her fictions play out as if under a magnifying glass, with each character’s flaws — both physical and psychological — expanded a thousandfold, in a manner that recalls Mary Gaitskill and A.M. Homes.

– L.A. Times

The opening lines of my autobiography will include the phrase, “Endless shame and eternal guilt.” But then it wouldn’t just about me, it would be about every modern Jewish woman living in America. Rachel Sherman’s new novel, Living Room, is just that: a book about every jealous, self-conscious, guilt-ridden Jewish broad and her mother and grandmother.

Written from the perspectives of three generations of Jewish women, the narrative shifts from Abby, a rebellious teen who is still growing into herself (and ever thankful for the benefits of facial waxing), to her mother, Livia, a former bombshell-come-housewife-come-aspiring interior decorator who can’t help but watch her vanity destroy herself and her family. Finally there’s Headie, the grandmother/mother-in-law with a juicy secret. Headie’s  just discovered the Internet, and for some reason, prefers the view from her kitchen floor.

From the same stock as writers like Lorrie Moore and Amy Hempel, Sherman’s characters thrive under her incredibly particular, telescopic descriptions of the fucked-up human condition. Strange little moments sparkle with humor (Headie’s all-caps email to her granddaughter, pleading in, so few words, to be spared the decoy duck she is making in tech class), and others are so humane, they break your heart. But proceed with caution, Jewish sisters, for reading Living Room is like watching your past and future flash before your depressed little eyes!

-Molly Auerbach, The Faster Times

(4 out of 5 stars) Multigenerational female-centric novels often involve bonding over ethnically specific formulas, or the shedding of copious, cleansing tears when a long-buried family secret comes to light. Not so Rachel Sherman’s Living Room. Mining territory she explored in her 2006 debut, a short-story collection calledThe First Hurt, Sherman turns her unflinching, unsentimental eye once again on deepest suburbia, where personal history festers rather than heals. Here we meet teenage Anna, tackling adolescent humiliations under the tutelage of a new bad-girl best friend. Anna’s mother, Livia, narcissistic and profoundly depressed, fantasizes about being a successful interior designer and develops an unhealthy attachment to the first client she manages to land. And twice-widowed Headie, Livia’s mother-in-law and Anna’s grandmother, crawls about her empty home (it’s easier than standing up) and mulls over the expanse of life behind her in occasionally graphic sexual detail.

The entertaining plot hums along, its heavier moments tempered with plenty of dark humor and incisive language; but it’s the intimate character sketches that truly resonate. Point of view rotates among the three women, who share a fascination with the treacheries of the body. Anna, excited and a bit overwhelmed by her awakening sexuality, contemplates the acne on her au pair’s face and the unwelcome hair on her own. Livia rues the inevitable softening as she slouches toward middle age, stuffing her face with junk food to fill the void she feels inside. Even Headie, barely clinging to the land of the living, wishes that she’d taken care of her feet, which she imagines were once her most perfect part. These inner monologues would be mortifying if bared in real life, but in Sherman’s skilled hands, they render the characters sympathetic, if still disturbing.

—Carolyn Juris, Time Out New York

Sherman’s riveting debut novel (after the collection The First Hurt) examines the dreams and disappointments of teenager Abby; her mother, Livia; and Abby’s grandmother, twice-widowed Headie. Each of the women harbors a secret none of the others suspect: Abby drowns her crippling insecurity in alcohol; Livia has an eating disorder; and Headie’s encroaching senility obscures a secret about her son, Jeffrey. Each, caught up in her own secret, neglects to notice the damage her preoccupation causes others. Vividly drawn secondary characters expand the story’s breadth—Abby’s bad-news friend Jenna; Jorgen, a Swedish au pair whose bad judgment nearly kills Abby; Simone, a lesbian psychiatrist Livia is attracted to for reasons she isn’t quite sure of; and Jeffrey, who acts as a narrative linchpin. Unsentimental yet deeply felt, this tale examines what bubbles under the surface of a supposedly happy Long Island family. (Oct.)

—Publisher’s Weekly

“A compelling and unsentimental novel about the loneliness that exists just below the surface of a family. Sherman skillfully and movingly renders the inner lives of three generations of women as they try—or don’t try—to reconcile the distance between their desires and their actual lives.”

—Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document

“Here we have the fractured lives of three generations of women told with zero sentimentality and a huge amount of heart. Living Room is edgy, moving, smart, funny, and altogether human. Rachel Sherman is the real deal.”

—Dani Shapiro, author of Black & White

“Rachel Sherman’s Long Island is a desolate place: lawns, indoor carpeting, a wet couch some high school kids dragged into the woods to smoke pot on. The au pair has acne and grandma can’t seem to turn off the caps lock key. Sherman, incredibly, is in no hurry to leave this place. She tells it all. The result is a funny, scary, dirty, and, in the end, a very moving, generous book.”

—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

“Living Room is that rare book that actually concerns itself with how we live now. Rachel Sherman’s lost Long Island women throb with life and she has the courage to look at these lives honestly, without pity but not without love.”

—Joshua Furst, author of The Sabotage Café