Shine Shine Shine

A debut unlike any other, Shine, Shine, Shineis a shocking, searing, breathless love story, a gripping portrait of modern family, and a stunning exploration of love, death and what it means to be human Sunny Mann has masterminded a life for herself and her family in a quiet Virginia town. Her house and her friends are picture-perfect. Even her genius husband, Maxon, has been trained to pass for normal. But when a fender bender on an average day sends her coiffed blonde wig sailing out the window, her secret is exposed. Not only is she bald, Sunny is nothing like the Stepford wife she's trying to be. As her facade begins to unravel, we discover the singular world of Sunny, an everywoman searching for the perfect life, and Maxon, an astronaut on his way to colonize the moon.Theirs is a wondrous, strange relationship formed of dark secrets, decades-old murders and the urgent desire for connection. As children, the bald, temperamental Sunny and the neglected savant Maxon found an unlikely friendship no one else could understand. She taught him to feelhelped him translate his intelligence for numbers into a language of emotion. He saw her spirit where others saw only a freak. As they grew into adults, their profound understanding blossomed into love and marriage.But with motherhood comes a craving for normalcy that begins to strangle Sunny's marriage and family. As Sunny and Maxon are on the brink of destruction, at each other's throats with blame and fear of how they've lost their way, Maxon departs for the moon, where he's charged with programming the robots that will build the fledgling colony. Just as the car accident jars Sunny out of her wig and into an awareness of what she really needs, an accident involving Maxon's rocket threatens everything they've built, revealing the things they've kept hidden. And nothing will ever be the same.

LYDIA NETZER was born in Detroit and educated in the Midwest. She lives in Virginia with her two home-schooled children and math-making husband. When she isn’t teaching, reading, or writing her next novel, she plays the guitar in a rock band. 

“A funny, compelling love story from the freshest voice I’ve heard in years. SHINE, SHINE, SHINE picked me up and left me changed in ways I never expected. Intelligent, emotional, and relentlessly new, Netzer answers questions you didn't know you were already asking and delivers an unforgettable take on what it means to love, to be a mother, and to be human.” ---Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Water for Elephants and Ape House

"Creating one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve read in a long time, Lydia Netzer manages to capture the outsider in each of us. Whether looking at the moon, a child, the suburban landscape, or the face in the mirror, Netzer shows us something we’ve never seen before, something we thought we knew. A beautifully written story where the exception proves the rule: the things that seem to divide us are, ultimately, the very things that unite us." ---Brunonia Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lace Reader and The Map of True Places. “A perfectly structured gem of a book that held me spellbound as I unraveled the twisted histories of this unconventional family. You’ve never read anything like it, and yet Sunny’s story is every woman’s story. We are all outsiders, all alone in space, all trying so hard to find a place called home. I loved this book.”   ---Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of gods in Alabama and Backseat Saints “An astronaut, an autistic child, a bald woman and a meteor collide, churning up the ground around a couple of decades-old murders. Life and death intersect in this wildly inventive love story I will be talking about and thinking about for years to come. If Yann Martel and Mary Gaitskill had a literary baby, it would look a lot like Lydia Netzer.” ---Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and American Rose