> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 20 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9781405921596
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.00

All Adults Here




Witty, astute, and irresistibly readable, All Adults Here is a novel about how to survive inside a modern family from the New York Times bestselling author of The Vacationers

Astrid Strick has always tried to do her best for her children. Now, they're finally grown up - but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Elliot doesn't have any idea who he really is, or how to communicate with his sons. Porter is, finally, pregnant - but feels incapable of rising to the challenge. Nicky has fled to distant New Mexico to live the bohemian dream.

And Astrid is up to things that would make her children's hair curl.

Until now, the family have managed to hide from each other. But when Nicky's daughter Cecelia comes to stay, her arrival threatens to upturn everything...

  • Published: 20 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9781405921596
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Emma Straub

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, All Adults Here and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

Also by Emma Straub

See all

Praise for All Adults Here

Praise for Emma Straub

-

It's the beautifully drawn, vibrant characters that make this smart, compelling novel so irresistible

Liane Moriarty

Hugely talented . . . intelligent holiday reading

Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4

Straub writes with such verve and sympathetic understanding of her characters . . . Reading this novel has all the pleasures of reading one of Anne Tyler's compelling family portraits

New York Times

Smart and entertaining

Stylist

A smart, cool sensibility

Elle

A funny and insightful look at love and relationships

Good Housekeeping

Lovely, satisfying

EW.com

Smart and fresh, offering new insights into the lives of people all around us

Brooklyn Magazine

Thoughtful and hilarious

Real Simple

It would be easy to compare Straub to other masters of the genre like Meg Wolitzer or Jennifer Egan, but she's already a master in her own right

The Millions

Wise and often hilarious

Buzzfeed

A precise and observant writer whose supple prose carries the story along without a snag. Straub's characters are a quirky and interesting bunch . . . it's a pleasure spending time with them

Starred Review, Kirkus

Readers will devour this witty and warmly satisfying novel

Publishers Weekly

Devilishly observed

Starred Review, Booklist

Straub is consistently excellent

Book Riot

Sprinkled with humour and insight

Starred Review, Library Journal

Straub writes beautifully and amusingly . . . hard to beat for sheer charm and gentle wit

Daily Mail

Warm and big-hearted . . . leaves you smiling for days

Maria Semple, bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Funny, poignant and beautifully observed

Jojo Moyes

A novel about how we try and fail at every age and yet somehow survive. It is brimming with kindness, forgiveness, humour and love and yet (magically) is also a page turner that held me captive until it was finished. This is Emma Straub's absolute best and the world will love it

Ann Patchett

A wonderful read

Elizabeth Strout

A warm and witty story about a family learning to accept the mistakes of the past and feeling their way towards a new, more truthful way of being together. Emma Straub has such a wonderful talent for depicting small-town existence, as well as the challenges and frustrations of family life, that I was utterly immersed in the world of the Stricks. It's one of those books that leaves you feeling as if you've visited a new place and met new friends. All Adults Here is a joy to read

Sarah Haywood, author of <i>The Cactus</i>

Straub etches in the comforting, often funny truths readers love her for. Like us, her characters are always getting older but never feeling quite old enough to do the right thing, to be the people they want to be, to let go of the past, and they're certainly never ready to die. An all-out celebration of the life force in ourselves and in our families

Booklist, Starred Review

As always, Straub draws her characters warmly, making them appealing in their self-centeredness and generosity, their insecurity and hope. . . . Straub has a sharp eye for her characters' foibles and the details of their liberal, upper-middle-class milieu. With humor and insight, Straub creates a family worth rooting for

Kirkus

No less charming than the rest of her oeuvre, about one family growing up and ageing, and how the parent-child roles between parents and their children is swapped

Thrillist

Will make you question your entire childhood, and how much your parents influenced it as you learn one mother's perspective of what went right and what went wrong with her own family

Marie Claire

Emma Straub is a master of the breezy, but still literary, family drama. Her fifth novel. . . . promises to be another sprawling, big-hearted page-turner

LitHub

The book has already roused a flood of fans clamoring to find out how Astrid's story ends

Reader's Digest

Likely to be the book that every single person will be reading this summer

Bookpage

The warm and funny novel only Emma Straub can deliver to us in this time of need

Paper Magazine

There's no drama like family drama as Emma Straub proves in this touching, humorous, and eye-opening new novel... All Adults Here weaves a memorable tale about navigating some of our most important, and most maddening, relationships

Town and Country

Perceptive and fun

AARP

It's good company

Leigh Haber, Book Editor at <i>O, The Oprah Magazine</i>

An affecting family saga that juggles issues as weighty as abortion, gender identity and bullying with ease

USA Today

All Adults Here is a master class on the small-scale American drama. There's a wry wink in the title; being grown up is no guarantee that you have it figured out. Ensconced in their upstate New York bubble, the Strick clan is the perfect show case...Yet this warm, optimistic novel argues that one should keep trying, regardless. All Adults Here affirms the value of community and family, no matter the strife that may rise up within them

Vogue US

In her witty new novel, All Adults Here, Emma Straub examines adolescence, ageing, gender, and sexuality through the nuanced experiences of three generations of a New York family

Harper's Bazaar US

All Adults Here will make you question your entire childhood

Marie Claire US

Emma Straub has done it again! All Adults Here introduces us to the Stricks, a delightfully flawed family, with matriarch Astrid at the centre...I know I've been having trouble adulting during this time (seriously, I have to cook, again?!), and the characters in this novel feel like they're struggling right alongside me

Read It Forward

Unlike parents when it comes to their children, novel readers are allowed to have favourite characters. This will be an impossible task for many readers of All Adults Here, in which Emma Straub switches among the perspectives of eight characters who are all endearing in their disarmingly muddleheaded or abjectly truth-seeking ways...gasp-worthy...belongs in the company of Cathleen Schine, Tom Perrotta and other fiction writers who understand that the degree of humour that can be teased from family drama is often directly proportional to the extent of the family's misery

Shelf Awareness

Come for the close examination of parental child roles, stay for goats

Good Housekeeping US

Smart and funny and warm, the kind of novel you fall into and don't ever want to end, which is exactly what we need now

Ann Patchett, The Times

In All Adults Here, Straub cements her status as a master of the domestic ensemble drama. While readers will relate to the comfortable familiarity of Straub's work, it has also taken on an unexpected air of escapism

Time Magazine

There's refuge to be found in stories of everyday people going about their lives...Emma Straub has become adept at finding amusement in the mundane, and her newest, All Adults Here, might just be her best yet

Oprah Magazine

The queen of the summer novel...we have turned to Emma Straub to bring us highly enjoyable, yet still thought-provoking, tales about witty protagonists in the throes of life changes

Entertainment Weekly

Busting with witty and poignant observations about the messiness of family

Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

A warm, funny novel

SheerLuxe

Straub's novel takes her signature wit upstate, exploring the complexities of small-town life and what it's like to live as an adult in the same place where you grew up

Deadline

Literary sunshine

New York Times

All Adults Here is deliciously funny and infectiously warm - a clever blend of levity and poignant insights. Straub's flair for irony and wit shine, and she puts a fresh (and progressive) spin on the age-old multigenerational family saga

Washington Post

A novel full of poignant insights into family

Woman & Home

If you can imagine a glorious mash-up of Elizabeth Strout and Gilmore Girls, All Adults Here is it

Red

If you're a fan of Anne Tyler's writing, you'll love this captivating, well-observed family drama

Good Housekeeping

If you can imagine a glorious mash-up of Elizabeth Strout and Gilmore Girls, All Adults Here is is

Red

If you're a fan of Anne Tyler's writing, you'll love this captivating well-observed family drama

Good Housekeeping

A novel full of poignant insights into family

Woman & Home

A warm, funny novel about the lifecycle of one family

Sheerluxe

Set over the course of an upstate New York summer, this shrewd, kindly tale embraces a topical spread of inter-generational challenges, yielding tart truths about love, class and family. It's spry and satisfying

Mail on Sunday

Written with true warmth and wit

Bella

Whips along with feel-good momentum, driven by warmth and love

Press Association

Great for fans of Liane Moriarty

Harpers Bazaar

Set over the course of an upstate New York summer, this shrewd, kindly tale embraces a topical spread of inter-generational challenges, yielding tart truths about love, class and family. It's spry and satisfying.

Mail on Sunday

Written with true warmth and wit

Bella

It takes rare skill to make everyday family ups and downs so pleasurable to read but Straub brings both a deceptive light touch and a flinty sense of humour to this breezy big-hearted portrait of ordinary people trying to negotiate the landscape of being a grown up. A superior slice of domestic fiction for fans of Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett

Metro

Smartly observant, wryly witty, big-hearted . . . Fans of Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler and Lily King should seek [Straub] out

The Sunday Times

This beautifully written book delves deeply, perceptively and humorously into the contemporary human condition

Daily Mail

Pulsating with perceptive wit . . . entertaining

Sunday Post

One of our favourite funny and kind books of the year . . . perfectly pitched summer reading

Stylist

If you've spent lockdown at home with the family, this one might just ring true for you. A witty, warm and thoroughly entertaining novel. Relatable

Luxe

Warm, witty, perceptive. Anne Tyler on laughing gas

Saga Magazine