Awards

• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2013
• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 (UK)
• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.
• Winner of Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.

Overview

Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood.Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history. The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.

Full Product Details

9781847083234

Table of Contents

Reviews

This novel starts at maximum force - and then it really gets going. I can't remember when I last read a novel of such narrative intensity; an unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing -- Salman Rushdie I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life -- Jeanette Winterson Reads like a brilliant miniseries. I gorged on it like a DVD boxset... Homes is dark and funny and elegant all at the same time. [This] has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, all told through the eyes of Larry David. It's the best thing I've read this year... Masterful -- Viv Groskop * Observer * Wonderful, wild, heartbreaking, hilarious and astonishing... This is a piercing, perceptive and deeply funny novel about the nature of life, family and love -- Doug Johnstone * Independent on Sunday * A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end it's a thoroughly original work of imagination -- Jay McInerney Exhilarating -- Lucy Lethbridge, Books of the Year * Observer * The most thrilling, ambitious, thought-provoking American novel to have emerged in a long while -- David Evans, Books of the Year * Independent on Sunday * Every page crackles with wit and intelligence -- Marcus Berkmann, Books of the Year * Spectator * One of the most acclaimed American writers of her generation -- Richard Grant * Telegraph Magazine * Laugh out loud funny... Completely wonderful. Extraordinary -- BBC Radio 4 * Saturday Review * Being a clever American novel, this is also an examination of the American dream... but, wherever you live, Homes's sharp, detailed prose will teem with gloriously free, un-airbrushed life -- Tim Auld * Sunday Telegraph * A brilliantly funny tale of a fractured family... [An] unmissable novel -- Eithne Farry * Marie Claire * Homes returns with another stylish read... Those who wish Jonathan Franzen wrote more frequently will devour Homes's work, and rightly so * Elle Magazine * Funny, nerve-touching, intelligent and even heartbreakingly sweet. You won't read many like this one, that's for sure * Psychologies * Her language is precise, her observations astute, her style punchy, her view of the world dark, but somehow accurate - disturbingly so -- Lucy Atkin * Sunday Times * To call [this] compelling would be an understatement; it is a novel as compulsive as its characters -- Emily Stokes * Financial Times * Homes manages a high-wire act in [this]. There are moments of outright satire... but these are always held in tandem to moments of real emotional engagement and insight... Sparkling -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman * A vitriolic satire of contemporary American society, often very funny and at times completely savage... Homes crafts a bold and genuinely disturbing attack on vanity, money-lust and our Faustian pact with materialism -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review * [A] humane, comic story of a good man trying to do the right thing * Vogue * A novel of great scope, taking some truly hideous events and spiking them with humour and realism * Emerald Street * A tour-de-force of pitch-black comedy... Excellent -- Theo Tait * Guardian * Horribly funny and unexpectedly uplifting -- Amber Pearson * Daily Mail * Bleakly funny -- Claire Allfree * Metro * Immensely likeable and sustained throughout by a vividly described plot heaving with believable grotesques... Homes has a feel for the comedic that is as well developed as her chillingly direct grasp of horror... A funny, fast-moving, picaresque, baggy satire -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Blackly humorous * Independent * Capable, likeable, readable -- Sarah Churchill * New Statesman * Brilliant... Homes draw[s] fascinatingly complex, flawed characters whose domestic situations run scarily outside their own control. Do yourself a favour and read this book * Bella * Humane [and] comic * Vogue * A bonkers yet quite brilliant book ... It deserves to be called a work of art -- Sarah Vine * The Times * Homes plays with the substance of the American dream, and gives us a horrific, internet-age deconstruction... only connect, Homes tells us, and we can escape the nightmare of the 21st century -- Philip Womack * Telegraph * Complex, nuanced and so engrossing that it makes you wish the real world would go away and leave you to read... A huge-hearted expansive book, simultaneously nightmare-black and extremely funny -- Lisa Gee * Independent * She has a deadpan understated humour that builds line by line into comic intent -- Jeanette Winterson * Guardian * [A] comic epic of modern America -- Sarah Churchwell * New Statesman * [Homes'] dialogue is extremely funny, worthy of a stand-up comic-rapid and raw... Unrelenting and endlessly inventive -- Edmund White * New York Book Review * Her biggest, broadest, most spacious novel yet, a dark carnival of American life in the 21st century... Cool, controlled... extraordinarily lucid -- Christopher Bollen * Interview Magazine * One of the strangest, most gripping and satisfyingly ugly books I've read in a long time -- Thomas Quinn * Big Issue * Laced with her trademark dark humour and emotional intensity, it's also a savage meditation on sex, violence, success, fulfilment and modern life... Epic * Diva * This is the great American novel for our time -- Jeanette Winterson, Books of the Year * Guardian * Wonderful, strange... at once dystopian and utopian, hovering somewhere between satire and sentiment -- Hannah Forbes Black * National * One of the best new American novels -- Edmund White, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement * The incendiary A.M. Homes exposes the black-comic mayhem behind the American front door -- Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year * Independent * Sit back and enjoy Homes's delicious black humour, her sharp characterisation, and thrilling narrative intensity -- David Evans * Independent on Sunday * [A] compelling dysfunctional family saga... Homes doesn't chronicle US life as much as take a cleaver to it and relish in the blood-splattered aftermath -- Darragh Reddin * Metro * I would not lose a word of her whip-sharp wit or unerring dialogue... Truly to die for -- Madeleine Kingsley * Jewish Chronicle * A white-knuckle black comedy about the vagaries of 21st-century living -- Doug Johnstone, Books of the Year * Scotsman * [It] is a savage and dizzyingly inventive satire on contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer... Inspiring * Stylist * Truly original, highly topical and yet, I suspect, utterly timeless * Laissez Faire * You'd have to have no sense of the absurd, and no sense of humour, not to be pretty impressed -- Theo Tait * Guardian * Compulsive and authentic -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald * Touching and uplifting * Daily Telegraph * Dazzling * Sunday Telegraph * A bristly, bumpy ride of a novel -- Katya Johnson * Daily Express * At once affecting and uproarious, the characters that Homes so deftly conjures will stay with readers well beyond when the final pages are turned -- Sonia Nair * Kill Your Darlings * Searing -- Kate Mosse * Mail on Sunday * It's strong stuff, and all the better for it * Guardian * Horribly funny and unexpectedly uplifting... Sensational * Daily Mail * Acutely observed * Women and Home * A novel that has everything: laughs; sibling hatred; horrifying turns of events; online misadventures... and the general meaning of life -- Simon Schama * Mail on Sunday * Darkly funny and compelling... [It] is the latest in a series of novels that display Homes' talent as one of the most consistently talented, funny and challenging storytellers of her generation * Huffington Post * Hilariously clever -- Viv Groskop, Books of the Year * Observer * This has all her mordant wit and close observation of flawed humanity -- Raffaella Barker * Daily Mail * [A] deeply enjoyable tale of festering sibling rivalry gone horribly wrong * Pride * A big American novel about family... funny and edging towards surreal in places. The book has a huge heart and an easy brilliance. A novel with everything -- Alex Hourston * Metro * One of those rare delights: a weird, scary, comic novel that actually makes you laugh out loud -- Simon Schama * Mail on Sunday * The wicked humour draws you in, but the cracking energy keeps you reading; there's a fierceness here that makes this tale of violence and family life quite unforgettable -- Natasha Walter * Stylist *

It's curious to be reading an author and comparing them not to another writer, but comedians. May We Be Forgiven reads something like an episode of Louis CK's magnificent show, Louie, if Larry David was co-writing. That's a lot to take in, I know, but this novel is deserving of such an overwrought comparison-it's that fascinating. <p>Ostensibly about a family recovering from a series of disasters, this novel swerves, meanders, and sidelines into such unexpected places, genres, and styles that every page feels like a new adventure. Few novels have held me in thrall and been so consistently surprising as this one. For example, in one hilarious sequence, the narrator offers his coffee to a disheveled man he presumes to be homeless, only to discover its Don DeLillo: the writer frequents the local hardware store. </p><p>Focused on Harry Silver, a middle-aged Professor who specializes in Richard Nixon, finds his life massively, irrevocably altered within the first five pages of the story. We join him as he navigates his (mostly) awful family and the absurdity-laden tumult of Post-Industrial world. This novel is huge in scope, and comparable to Jonathan Frazen's Freedom in its depiction of modern America. You know those writers whose voices are so singular they change the way you see the world? -AM Homes is one of them. </p>

Author Information

A.M. Homes is the author of the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers and Jack, two collections of short stories, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, and the highly acclaimed memoir The Mistress's Daughter, as well as the travel memoir Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes frequently on arts and culture for numerous magazines and newspapers. She is currently writing for a new major US TV Series. She lives in New York City.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available