{ "item_title" : "A Reasonable Man", "item_author" : [" Jeremy Nicholas "], "item_description" : "You've done beautiful work on everything anyone can see.Chris Corrigan knows how things fail. He is a forensic structural engineer, paid to walk into the wreckage and determine what was carrying the load until it wasn't.At fifty-seven, he has built a life that still looks remarkably sound. A career. Two daughters he adores. A nineteen-year marriage. A beautiful home. And a sailboat that could carry him to the island he can see from shore.He has the boat.He can see the island.He just can't seem to leave the harbor.A marriage nobody is unhappy insideChris and his wife co-parent beautifully. They host at Christmas. They have not touched each other in a decade, and they have slept at opposite ends of the house for six years.That arrangement is not an accident. He engineered it, deliberately, to protect two daughters from a marriage that had already failed, and it worked. His girls adore their mother. Nobody in that house has raised a voice in years.It cost him everything it was ever going to cost, and nobody has added it up.Six women, one yearOver the course of a single year, six women come close enough to find out exactly how reasonable a man Chris Corrigan is.A nurse who calls his bluff on a boat he never sails. A widow who asks the only practical question anyone has put to him in ten years. A marine surveyor who takes the boat apart in six hours and finds the rot behind the varnish. A veterinary technician who discovers that the truest thing he says to her is a sentence he has said before. A court reporter holding one of his sentences since 2013. And his wife, who has been waiting for him to sit down across from her for a decade.His job is to explain the failure afterward. Every one of them can see this one coming.Told twiceA Reasonable Man is a novel in stories, assembled from testimony and correction: his account and then hers, a legal declaration, an appellate brief, a father's unsent letters, a twelve-year-old's notebook, a daughter's college essay.Every encounter is told twice. His version comes first. Hers has the part he didn't see.It is a book about the distance between understanding your life and changing it, about the structures we maintain long after they have stopped carrying us, and about a man who finally has to decide whether knowing the way across is the same thing as being willing to go.Explaining is free. Until it costs you the life you were explaining away.For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Jenny Offill, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Contains explicit sexual content and adult situations.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/899/642/9798996425891_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "14.99", "online_price" : "14.99", "our_price" : "14.99", "club_price" : "14.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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