MEET THE NEWMANS by Jennifer Niven
9781250372444
1/6/26
Flatiron Books
Fiction / Performing Arts / Family Life
You may know Jennifer Niven for her YA novels, including ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES, but MEET THE NEWMANS is her highly anticipated adult debut! It’s a sweeping story about love, fame, purpose, friendship, creativity, loss, and, most of all, the evolution of a family.
For twelve years, Del and Dinah Newman and their two sons, Guy and Shep, were America’s favorite family, playing themselves on the beloved show Meet the Newmans. But now, as ratings are falling, so are the Newmans themselves.
When Del is in an accident, he can no longer oversee the show as its writer, director, actor, and producer, and the remaining Newmans step up to keep the show from being canceled. Dinah takes on the roles of writer and sponsor-seeker, finally confronting what she’s suppressed for years. To craft a finale that will shape television history, she hires a female reporter, Juliet, whose wildly different perspectives on womanhood, family, and representation clash with her own. Meanwhile, Guy finally steps into the director’s role, and Shep begins to shed his on-screen “perfect boy” persona to embrace authenticity. Can the Newmans change television history, or will they be canceled before they get the chance?
Told through multiple perspectives from the four Newmans and a few other key characters, the novel is funny, big-hearted, and intimate. It also brilliantly traces the history of television and the significant cultural shift in feminism between the 1950s and ’60s. It’s a rich family story about the dual lives we lead, because we all have a ‘behind-the-scenes.’ I was swept up in all the Newmans’ stories, but it is the relationship between Dinah and Juliet that really absorbed me as I read. Though generations apart, through conversation they force each to confront her own assumptions and what it means to be a woman in the media and the workforce, sparking a unique friendship between them.
Dive into a dazzling, intimate look at the dawn of television and witness a family fighting not just for their show, but to rewrite the rules of what America is ready to see on screen. MEET THE NEWMANS will be irresistible to readers who were enthralled by the similar subject matter and themes in LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY.
“Tapping into a keen sense of family fault lines, Jennifer Niven gives us the Newmans—a seemingly perfect television family who, once the cameras stop rolling, are barely holding it together in a rapidly changing world. Warm, witty, and wise, this is a novel about reclaiming the narrative when the cost of pretending becomes too high to bear.”—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of THE NEST
“Jennifer Niven is a master at crafting a glittery facade and then showing us in full hilarious, heartbreaking detail what lies beneath. Trust me, you don’t want to miss meeting these Newmans.”—Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author of THE GUNCLE
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