I read about The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright in the Summer 2008 BookSense newsletter. Here's what it said:
Book clubs will find lots to discuss in this appealing novel of a British family [the Judds] coming to terms with changes of fortune. Juliet, the favored daughter, has been released from a New York prison after serving a term for an art swindle. As her brother gently eases her back to freedom, the rest of the family anticipates her return. Writing with wry humor and an sly affection for all the characters, Cartwright does a masterful job of describing the redemptive power of love.
The NY Times reviewed this book and calls it "a genuinely moving story about the hazards and consolations of familial love." It continues:
Mr. Cartwright's Updikean eye for how people live today and his dramatist's ear for how they talk enable him to conjure this England with wry humor, while using the arts of empathy and ventriloquism to make palpable the lives of all five Judds. In doing so, he has given us an elegant, if flawed novel that threads the comic and the tragic together into story that, at its best, is as affecting as it is gripping.
Bookreporter says, "As Tolstoy once wrote as the opening first lines to Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Justin Cartwright's eighth novel is a true testament to the disparaging trials any family might encounter and to what ends they might have to travel to make it through to the other side."
Has anyone read this, or anything else by Justin Cartwright?