Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist
about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend
of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would
be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk
are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris,
almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from
a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence
at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert
island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere
in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there
is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes,
Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the
human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York
Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious,"
as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of
his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
Verlag: Hachette
Book Group USA
Seiten: 272 S. Erscheinungsjahr: 2018 Ausführung: Kartonierter Einband (Kt)
