Testimony: A Novel - Hardcover

Shreve, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316059862 ISBN 13: 9780316059862

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2008

Synopsis

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices--those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal--that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.

Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her own greatest work, Anita Shreve delivers in TESTIMONY a gripping emotional drama with the impact of a thriller. No one more compellingly explores the dark impulses that sway the lives of seeming innocents, the needs and fears that drive ordinary men and women into intolerable dilemmas, and the ways in which our best intentions can lead to our worst transgressions.

About this title

Review:

'Anita Shreve is a phenomenon. As ever - and even though the novel is written from different points of view - the power of Shreve's writing lies in it relentless passivity. The prose is undemonstrative, yet insidiously accomplished. For some, it may be reassuring that an author who can command a readership as large as Shreve's should choose to write a novel of this sort. On the surface, it is a brave, uncompromising choice for someone occasionally criticised as being a "woman's writer". Yet I think that Testimony goes further than this. It is so unforgiving of a panoply of human frailty as to be misanthropic'

Review:

'A perfectly pitched account of human fallibility and the snares of temptation'

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0316059862
• ISBN 13: 9780316059862
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307