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"Richard Yates's best novel, which makes it wonderful. From the first sentence to the last...I loved the book" - Joan Didion
"Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life ..."
Children of divorced parents, sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable - married, with three sons - and has 'flair', Emily is intellectual but na?ve, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's acclaimed novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past and finally reach for some semblance of renewal. This extraordinary story of two women is another masterpiece from the author of Revolutionary Road.
"Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters ... A spare yet wrenching tale" New York Times
"Invigorating and gripping ... every word works quietly to establish the illusion that things are happening by themselves ... A literary achievement" Time
"An eloquent, moving novel, quietly poignant" Larry McMurtry, Washington Post
"Few men since Flaubert have offered such sympathy to women whose lives are hell" Kurt Vonnegut
"A tour de force ... an unflinching novel of rare power" Mordecai Richler
Praise for Richard Yates
The Easter Parade
Revolutionary Road
"If Cheever drew more poetry and surrealism out of the suburbs, Yates drew more despair...As the developed world becomes ever more suburban in both dwelling-place and soul, this is a novel worth attending to." Julian Barnes, Guardian Books of the Year
"The literary discovery of the year for me...It's as brilliantly nuanced as Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald." Nick Hornby
"I hand out copies of Revolutionary Road to anyone who will take them...one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all American literature." David Hare, Observer
"A revelation...This is the great lost novel of American Realism and the influence of this largely ignored masterpiece can only now be recognised as immense" Uncut Books of the Year
"At last...the opportunity to discover America's finest forgotten author. Yates [is] such a magnificent writer...His unsparing yet marvellous dissection of the American dream should not be missed" Paul Connolly, The Times
"One of the great forgotten classics of modern American literature...Beautifully observed and tautly written" Eve
Collected Stories
"An unforgettable and long-overdue compilation of work by one of the great, neglected American writers of the postwar era" Stephen Amidon, New Statesman Books of the Year
"The book I enjoyed most [this year]...Yates is a master of the form" Sebastian Faulks, Independent Books of the Year
"Now that the stories are collected in one place we are able to see more clearly Yates's position in the American canon....Read and weep." Kate Atkinson, Guardian
"These stories show the devastating economy and intensity of a master of the form" Lisa Allardice, Daily Telegraph
"This collection is so extraordinarily good that readers will wonder why they haven't heard of Richard Yates before, and where they can get more of this American writer's work" Sunday Tribune
"Yates was the most perceptive, but most underrated American author of the twentieth century. He told us things we did not want to hear...it was what made him such a great writer. It is now time to listen." The Times
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