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Brand
new and unread
UK
First edition, first print
Signed
by the author to official publisher’s bookplate
Limited
edition - features exclusive
author Q&A
Traversing three centuries
and three alternative versions of the American experiment, the author of A Little Life returns with a
spellbinding chronicle of love, the meaning of family and the excruciating cost
of unattainable dreams.
From the author of the classic A Little
Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different
versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive
promise of utopia.
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York
is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please
(or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists
betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In
a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with
his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate
of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by
totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to
navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s
disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling
and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one
another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness,
and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and
the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous
righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a
place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist.
What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings
with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.