Too Many Men

A brilliant tour de force that showcases Lily Brett’s distinctive voice, flawless way with words, and acute sense of character and setting, Too Many Men is a fresh, penetrating novel filled with sensitivity, emotional complexity, and irreverent wit.

Ruth Rothwax a successful, independent, New York woman with her own business, Rothwax Correspondence, can find order and meaning in the words she writes for other people — condolence letters, thank-you letters, even you-were-great-in-bed letters. But as the devoted daughter of Edek Rothwax, an Auschwitz survivor with a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to the English language. Ruth can find no words to tell her understand the loss her family experienced during World War II.

Ruth is obsessed with the idea of returning to Poland with her father, Edek, but she doesn’t quite understand why she feels this so intensly. To make sense of her family’s past — and the way her parents’ lives were suddenly torn apart by the Nazis — yes. To visit the places where her beloved mother and father lived and almost died, certainly. But there’s more to this trip than Ruth’s extraordinary perceptiveness can identify. By facing Poland and the past, she can confront her own future.

The gripping story of a woman’s search for memory and meaning, and the reconciliation of present and past within the complicated fabric of family, Too Many Men is an evocative exploration of the reverberations of loss and a remarkable journey of the heart that no reader will easily forget.