"Are we there yet?"
It's a dreaded sentence. When it's spoken by an anxious child from the back seat, it's enough to make stressed-out parents wish they'd never taken a family vacation in the first place. And even if it's delivered as a sing-songy punch line, from an impatient partner or spouse on a long road trip, it's an irritating eye-roller of a joke.
So this Memorial Day weekend -- the unofficial start of the summer vacation season, and therefore the summer fiction season -- we asked two novelists to reclaim the sentence in a new and adult context. For our latest fiction project, there was only one simple rule: Each story had to include the line "Are we there yet?" in a fresh and surprising way.
Our authors are two people you should be taking to the beach with you this summer. Chris Pavone is the author of "The Expats," the New York Times best-selling thriller with more satisfying twists than the Pacific Coast Highway. Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of "The Green Shore," one of 2012's most anticipated debut novels, a beautiful family drama that is set during another Greek crisis -- the 1967 military coup.
To read the stories, just follow the links below:
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