Jennifer Egan is een auteur wiens werken worden geprezen om hun diepgang en stilistische meesterschap. Haar romans verkennen vaak complexe menselijke relaties en het hedendaagse leven met een uniek perspectief dat lezers in haar verhalen trekt. Ze weeft behendig diverse gezichtspunten en tijdlijnen samen, waardoor rijke en boeiende leeservaringen ontstaan. Egan staat bekend om haar precieze proza en scherpe inzichten in de menselijke psyche, wat haar positie als een belangrijke hedendaagse stem verstevigt.
New York 1940. Op de marinebasis in Brooklyn wemelt het tijdens de oorlog van de vrouwelijke arbeiders met banen die voorheen niet voor hen waren weggelegd. Onder hen bevindt zich de achttienjarige Anna Kerrigan, dochter van een ondergrondse koerier die zijn gezin onverwachts in de steek liet. Na een zware duikopleiding waarbij ze veel moed en wilskracht toont, wordt Anna de eerste vrouwelijke marineduikster. Ze is vastbesloten het mysterie rond de verdwijning van haar vader op te lossen – ook al betekent dit dat zij zal moeten infiltreren in de maffiawereld van New York.
In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith’s lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan’s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.
The Penguin English Library Edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot 'She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings - that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day' George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for adult people'. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review
The theme of longing in all its forms-for change, for redemption, for travel outside the bounds of daily life to realms where anything seems possible--unites this master story collection. In the extraordinary "Why China?" a man drags his family to the Xi'an province in a desperate attempt to reclaim his lost integrity, only to find himself more remote and mysterious than the place where his journey led. In settings as exotic as Kenya and Bora Bora, as glamorous as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois, Egan's characters--models, housewives, schoolgirls--seek transformation of the body and spirit, and transcendence of the borders of desire."
It's 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He's forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalising" memory. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, Own Your Unconscious--that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others--has seduced multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan takes her "deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture" (Vogue) to stunning new heights and delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.[Bokinfo].
In Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan's remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.
In a captivating narrative, Jennifer Egan explores a world where escape is unattainable, and the tower symbolizes both the ultimate sanctuary and a necessary sacrifice for survival. The story delves into themes of protection and the difficult choices faced in dire circumstances, highlighting the tension between clinging to safety and the need to let go for the sake of life. Egan's masterful storytelling brings this complex emotional landscape to life, engaging readers in a profound examination of resilience and sacrifice.
Recently recovered from a catastrophic car accident, fashion model Charlotte Swenson returns to life in Manhattan. Her beautiful face conceals eighty titanium screws that hold together her shattered bones. Charlotte, now unrecognizable to those who knew her before the accident, begins to float invisibly away from her former life and into an ephemeral world of fashion nightclubs and Internet projects, where image and reality blur. "Look at Me" is both a satire of our image-obsessed times and a mystery of human identity. Jennifer Egan illuminates the difficulties of shaping an inner life in a culture preoccupied with surfaces and asks whether 'truth' can have any meaning in an era when reality itself has become a style.Written with a masterful intelligence and grace, "Look at Me" establishes Jennifer Egan as one of the most daring and gifted novelists of her generation. 'The plot is a glorious and intricate mechanism, but it is Egan's style that ignites the imagination. Her prose is balanced, evocative and beautiful. And her underlying interest in the nature of self, image and reality permeates this sardonic and forceful work' - "Daily Telegraph". 'Bitingly intelligent satire on American celebrity culture' - "Independent". 'A parody of the self-discovery novel, it's an intelligent, gripping read about the manipulation of the individual' - "Time Out".
