You Don't Have To Live Like This - Softcover

Markovits, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571313426 ISBN 13: 9780571313426

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2016

Synopsis

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Ten years out of Yale and drifting through a teaching career, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk. There he bumps into an old friend, Robert James, now wealthy and influential from dotcom success. He has a plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit and build a new America from their ruins. For a small investment, Greg can turn himself into a twentieth-century pioneer. But for every urban misfit who's come for a fresh start, there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by these new young colonials. Soon, the realities of life on America's urban frontier become all too apparent . . .

About this title

Review:

Intense and very funny. Source: Guardian 'Best Novels of 2015'

Is Benjamin Markovits contemporary fiction's best kept secret? .... [his] seventh novel is as profound a meditation on contemporary America as you're likely to read this year. Author: Max Liu Source: Independent on Sunday

It is a remarkable novel ... This is fiction writing that is alive in your hand. Source: Irish Independent

Multi-stranded and gripping . . . So engrossing, so satisfyingly complex. Source: Sunday Times

Reads like a season of The Wire scripted by J M Coetzee . . . Like the lives it describes, this novel contains multitudes. Source: Independent on Sunday

You Don't Have to Live Like This is a very smart book, with vividly drawn characters and densely-woven themes ... at its heart is the vexatious question of race. Author: Mick Brown Source: Daily Telegraph

[A] consistently impressive novel: a strikingly current portrait of tinderbox race relations that also raises enduring questions about the good life and the nature of truth ... highly recommended. Author: Stephanie Cross Source: Daily Mail

Markovits articulates this irretrievably messy subject with exhilarating clarity and a good deal of bravery ... The prose delivers spare, fast-paced social realism (think Jonathan Franzen on Slimfast) and the plot is multi-stranded and gripping. Author: Claire Lowdon Source: Sunday Times

Terrifically readable ... a sweeping story of gentrification, class war and racism in America. Source: Literary Review

[A] subtle and finely poised novel. Author: Stuart Kelly Source: Spectator

Book Description:

From one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists comes a darkly comic and brutally insightful vision of contemporary America in the wake of the global financial crisis.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0571313426
• ISBN 13: 9780571313426
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400