Brilliantly depicts characters in pinpoint prickly prose (Guardian)Funny and wonderfully mean spirited (Saturday Review)The family dynamic has been rendered exceptionally well (Herald)Phenomenally strange (Observer)'Downright hilarious... Like watching a slow-motion car crash. Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humour' Stephen KingA riotously dysfunctional portrait of one all-American family and its diabolical matriarch - by one of America's most acclaimed writersEveryone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hard-working, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant -- endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a vice-like hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood.Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism. This is an engrossing, hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of a modern family -- the bickering, the conspiracies, and the drive to overcome the painful ties that bind.