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About the Book

About the Book

The Misfortune of Marion Palm

A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her children’s private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator they had to have, and state-of-the-art exercise equipment, gathering dust. When the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from her basement and runs. Leaving her husband and two daughters to grapple with the consequences of her crime, and the mother-shaped hole in their house, Marion is on the lam, hiding in plain sight.

Brilliantly skewering the mores of a status-obsessed society, and perfectly capturing the spirit of bourgeois Brooklyn Heights, this wildly entertaining debut novel features a “bad mom” you can’t help but love.

Audiobook available, read by Saskia Maarleveld

The Misfortune of Marion Palm
by Emily Culliton

  • Publication Date: June 26, 2018
  • Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction
  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0525432620
  • ISBN-13: 9780525432623