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The Garrick Year

Published
Jul 2009
Main Genre
General Fiction General Fiction
Rating
Pages
172

About This Book

From the Golden PEN Award–winning author: A "well-written, entertaining" dark comedy of a marriage on the rocks in 1960s London (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times).

 


Emma and David Evans seem to have a perfect life. He's a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she's a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She's impatient and choked by domesticity; he's narcissistic and unfaithful. Between the two of them is a privately combative marriage that has fed their want of drama.


 


Then David relocates the family from their London home to provincial Hereford, where he's to star in two plays during the city's festival season. It's here, far removed from the highbrow stimulation of the city, that Emma's resentment of David—his long hours, his expectations, his ego—finally boils over. Bored and lonely, she falls into the arms of the theater's director, an indiscretion that triggers a series of surprises neither Emma nor David could have foreseen.


 


Narrated by a complicated, fascinating, and fiercely intelligent woman at the end of her rope, The Garrick Year is "a witty, beautiful novel . . . written with extraordinary art" (The New York Times).


 


"[A] romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies . . . deliciously bitter . . . so alive." —The New Yorker

 


"Unsparing . . . a very knowing, diverting entertainment." —Kirkus Reviews

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First Edition Jul 2009 Penguin (UK) ISBN 0140025499
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Aug 1984 Plume ISBN 0452255902
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Aug 1984 Plume ISBN 0452262828
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Jan 2036 Orion (UK) ISBN 1474611354
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eBook

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Oct 2013 Houghton Mifflin ISBN B00FJ5EPXY
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Oct 2013 Houghton Mifflin ISBN 054428691X
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Apr 2026 Canongate Canons ISBN 183726483X
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Hardcover
Nov 1982 MacMillan ISBN 085119186X
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