“This is Flusfeder’s masterpiece.” —Julie Myerson

New York City 1970: Emma Hoffman is the great party-giver of the Upper West Side. She’s a writer, wife, mother, hostess, guest, trying to excel and trying to find a way through the agonies and complacencies of it all – because at any moment something might fall, perhaps herself. Four years later, her son is going out alone into the streets of Manhattan on his eleventh birthday, to make himself new, and prove to be worthy of the birthday letters he continues to receive from his lost, soaring mother.

Something Might Fall is a kind of historical fiction, set in a moment when women’s literary voices were being heard in a new, confessional, intimate way, but the conditions of those writers’ relationships and their domestic obligations were not so different from those of their mothers. The first part, which swoops and stutters between Emma Hoffman and her husband, Dr Nicholas Sawyer, is about a woman at the edge of herself and is also an account of a marriage, embodying two consciousnesses in a mutual misunderstanding and disappointment and hope and sometimes magic. The second part is limited to just one point of view, of their son Nicky, the living in aftermath, exploring Manhattan on his own on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.

David Flusfeder is the author of seven novels and one work of narrative non-fiction. He has been a TV critic for The Times, and a poker columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. He has written for The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman, The Mail on Sunday, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung amongst others. His short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Granta, Esquire, Arena, He Played for his Wife, The Seven Deadly Sins, New Writing 8, Fatherhood and The Jewish Quarterly. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.