A Calling for Charlie Barnes

A Calling for Charlie Barnes
Joshua Ferris
RRP:
NZ$ 24.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 19.20
Paperback
h198 x 129mm - 352pg
10 Mar 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780241972953
Out Of Stock
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From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a poignant novel about fathers, sons and the embers of the American dreamCharlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie. He certainly seems simple enough- he' s a striver, a romantic, and a thoroughgoing capitalist. But suddenly blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news, he might have to rethink his life from top to bottom, and on short notice. What makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?
Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius,A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write. -- Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire Brilliant, funny, heartbreaking -- Ferris has taken the Updike-Roth model and set it spinning with masterly narrative fireworks. Family, memory, ambition and death, all told with dervishing glee. Not just a daredevil of a novel, but something truly new -- Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest * Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls * A deeply funny, very moving book . . . Ferris' s hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages -- Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant . . . A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities -- Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia Ferris' s work cuts to the heart of who we are by focusing very painfully on who one man was . . . Consider this book not just a work of grief or love or memoir, then, but a work of hope, too. * Publishers Weekly * Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there * New York Times Book Review on To Rise Again at a Decent Hour * Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel. . . Then We Came to the End feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness * Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times on Then We Came to the End * Dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be * Guardian, on ' To Rise Again at a Decent Hour' * Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate * Observer, on ' Then We Came to the End' * Very funny, intense and exhilarating * The Times, on ' Then We Came to the End' *
Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories. His debut, Then We Came to the End, won the PEN/Hemingway award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award and his most recent novel, To Rise Again at A Decent Hour, was nominated for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. He lives in upstate New York.

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