Play It As It Lays

Description

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking. Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies' room and never came back. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives - the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.

Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

'She writes with a razor ... You are both frightened and astonished ... It seems to me just about perfect, so heartbreaking and inescapable' New York Times 'Didion's modant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts' Time, Top 100 Novels of All Time 'For a few decades, this was my favourite modern American novel ... revelatory' Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho