Ordinary Decent Criminals - Hardcover

Shriver, Lionel

2.96

145 ratings by Goodreads

9780002239486: Ordinary Decent Criminals

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002239485 ISBN 13: 9780002239486

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1992

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Estrin Lancaster has fled Philadelphia for a life of perpetual motion. Now, in Belfast, she revels more than she would like in the company of Ireland's most inflammatory wit, Farrell O'Phelan. Born into conflict, his acute mind is irredeemably twisted by his efforts to make sense of Ireland.

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Review:

Praise for Lionel Shriver:

‘Shriver proves she is not afraid of anything...’
Observer

‘It's a wonder that subject matter on the surface so bleak can be transformed into something so uplifting’
Daily Telegraph

‘You can rely on Lionel Shriver to upend your expectations’
Daily Express

‘Required reading for all mortals’
Daily Mail

‘...witty, observant and beautifully controlled’
Literary Review

From the Back Cover:

For ten years, Estrin Lancaster has fled Philadelphia. From the Philippines to Berlin, she's been a traveler without a destination, an expatriate without a motherland. In each of the cities Estrin favors, she manages an apartment, a job, a lover, and never tarries past the first signs of ennui.

Her latest destination is Belfast, in Northern Ireland. After twenty years of ritualized violence, this city, too, is exhausted--a town in which if one more bomb explodes in the city center, old ladies blow the dust off their treacle cakes and count their change. Here the lanky and spiteful Farrell O'Phelan, former purveyor of his own bomb-disposal service, technically Catholic but everyone's aggravation, wrangles through the maze of factions in the North by despising every side. Farrell's affair with the curious Estrin is nonetheless a meeting of two loners; like hers, Farrell's marathoning around the planet has become like running in place. In deadlocked Northern Ireland, it has become harder and harder to believe that anything is happening at all.

A grand tragicomedy--one of the earliest displays of the ambition and intelligence that has since earned Lionel Shriver worldwide acclaim--Ordinary Decent Criminals is about conflict groupies, people terrified of domesticity who stir up anguish in their lives and their countries to avoid the greater horror of what lies closest to home.

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