Andrew Ridker - Jótét souls

Arthur Alter is in trouble. As a mediocre professor at a Midwestern college, he can't pay his mortgage, his much younger girlfriend can leave him at any time, and his grown children won't talk to him. In addition, he is also weighed down by an unpleasant financial matter: his recently deceased wife, Francine, secretly amassed a small fortune, which she then left to their children.

The boy is Ethan, who lives as a neurotic recluse in the cool neighborhood of Brooklyn, and the girl is Maggie, who tries to live a noble life with compulsive abstinence. Worried about the loss of their family home, Arthur invites them to St. Louis under the title of reconciliation, but by doing so he unwittingly opens a Pandora's box of a thousand years of grievances and memories - most of which are linked to Francine, the woman whose life may hold the key to them all.

Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St. Louis and a small town in Zimbabwe, Good Souls is a wryly humorous, emotional family story in the manner of Jonathan Franzen, among other things, about what it means to be a "good person".