Here I Am - Softcover

Foer, Jonathan Safran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374938210 ISBN 13: 9780374938215

Publisher: Fsg Adult, 2016

Synopsis

A monumental new audiobook from the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, “Abraham!” before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, “Here I am.” Later, when Isaac calls out, “My father!” before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, “Here I am.”

How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others’? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in eleven years—a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home—and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers and critics loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer’s most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer’s stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of the most important writers in America.

About this title

Review

Publisher's description. The New York Times bestselling new novel from the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Wildly exhilarating and profoundly moving, this is the story of a man in crisis, a family imploding, a planet on the brink of disaster. Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now. (Penguin)

Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown . . . and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read. (The Times)

An ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Foer's best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all. Has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well-reviewed books of midlist fiction put together. (New York Times)

A brilliantly acrobatic imagination (Sunday Times)

Foer writes like a dream. . . big-hearted, courageous and jaw-droppingly clever (Deborah Moggach)

Provocative . . . very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script. (Sunday Times)

Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family. (TIME)

Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking. (New Statesman)

A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives. (Evening Standard)

Unarguably Foer's most substantial and impressive work yet. (Herald)

From the Back Cover

'Very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script' Sunday Times

Jacob and Julia Bloch are about to be tested . . .
By Jacob's grandfather, who won't go quietly into a retirement home.
By the family reunion, that everyone is dreading.
By their son's heroic attempts to get expelled.
And by the sexting affair that will rock their marriage.

A typical modern American family, the Blochs cling together even as they are torn apart. Which is when catastrophe decides to strike . . .

'Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown and the End of the World' The Times

'Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking' New Statesman

'A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives' Evening Standard

'Brilliant, masterly, always original' New York Times

'Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry' Scotland on Sunday

[backlist thumbs - EXTREMELY and EVERYTHING]

About this edition

• Publisher: Fsg Adult
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0374938210
• ISBN 13: 9780374938215
• Binding: Paperback