A meditation on the limits of what we can and cannot have, set in a city—New York—that would have us think that we can have it all, Cooler Heads is a tour de force and impossible to put down, a literary triumph.

Julian Tepper’s fourth novel, Cooler Heads, is a story about modern love. With a triangulation of lovers and spouses, young children and careers struggling to get off the ground, in Celia and Paul we encounter two people in that pocket of life when the fight to figure out who we are and what we want burns brightest.