The Age of Grief - Brossura

Jane Smiley was born in LA, grew up in St Louis and studied at Vassar and Iowa. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 1992 for ‘A Thousand Acres’.

This superb collection of five short stories and a novella presents an unforgettable portrait of the perils of domestic life. In the title novella, a man who has reached the age of grief – that age when ‘the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and the rest of the world have broken down’ – slowly realizes that his wife is in love with someone else. Unsure whether his marriage is best protected by challenging her or by feigning ignorance, he struggles to repress his anguish and to prevent his wife discovering that he is aware of her infidelity.

“Faultlessly written, each nuance brilliantly captured.”
SUNDAY TIMES

“A tender, sad, wise tale of marriage. Jane Smiley is a discerning observer of manners and morals, a compassionate chronicler of loneliness in middle America.”
LISTENER

“'The Age of Grief' resonates with the simple pathos of Chekhov.”
VANITY FAIR

“Truth is what Jane Smiley cares about most. If one of the purposes of fiction is to illuminate dark corners of life, then she fulfils it triumphantly.”
MARGARET FORSTER, 'Spectator'

“A triumph of the craft of narrative.”
NEW YORK TIMES

“Jane Smiley is fast becoming the Balzac of the late-20th-century American Midwest.”
ALISON LURIE