The Great Wide Open

Author(s): Douglas Kennedy

Fiction

Its 1980s New York. Heady, excessive times. Alice Burns - a young book editor - is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations resonates, perhaps because she has just watched her own family implode. As she reads she wonders- When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice? Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school bullying, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970's Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan. But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers; how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others. The Great Wide Open is an immensely ambitious and compulsive saga; a novel which will speak volumes to anyone who has marvelled at that pain that can only be caused by family itself. 'In his fast-paced, engrossing novels Douglas Kennedy always has his brilliant finger on the entertaining parts of human sorrow, fury, and narrow escapes.'- Lorrie Moore 'Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story.' - Esquire ' Kennedy possesses a Hitchcockian approach to this narrative hub; tension and twists are administered in equal measure . . . The ordinary becomes, through his careful plotting, extraordinary.' - Independent on Sunday


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780091953737
  • : Hutchinson
  • : Hutchinson
  • : 0.772
  • : November 2018
  • : ---length:- '23.4'width:- '15.3'units:- Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 496
  • : Paperback
  • : Douglas Kennedy