The Innocents - Softcover

Segal, Francesca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1401341896 ISBN 13: 9781401341893

Publisher: Hyperion - Acquired Assets, 2013

Synopsis

*** Winner of the 2012 Costa First Novel Award ***

*** Winner of the 2013 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, the 2013 Sam Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, and the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction ***

A smart and slyly funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment; a triumphant and beautifully executed recasting of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London. He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry. To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community--a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam's role in a warm, inclusive family he loves.

But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel's younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he'd care to admit. Ellie--beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent--offers a liberation that he hadn't known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home?

About this title

Review:

"An emotionally and intellectually astute debut."--Kirkus

"[A] delightful first novel... wise, witty and observant."--The London Times

"Segal writes with an understated elegance."--The Observer (UK)

Book Description:

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD: a witty and utterly enjoyable debut - a very modern love story which tells the age-old tale of love, temptation, confusion, commitment, and coming to terms with the choices we've made

About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion - Acquired Assets
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1401341896
• ISBN 13: 9781401341893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304