Timequake

Description

'A wise, winning and utterly charming concoction of fiction, commentary and autobiography' Literary Review 'Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original' - Guardian According to science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13th February 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will - not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Utterly original...capable of moving from irony to lament within a sentence * Guardian * Reading Timequake... I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed...a wise, winning and utterly charming concoction of fiction, commentary and autobiography * Literary Review * Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original * Guardian * Fascinating digressions, epigrams and memories, vitalised by Vonnegut's irrepressible intelligence and comic imagination, creating a movingly intimate work * Harper's Bazaar * Highly entertaining... The portraits of Vonnegut's first wife, brother and sister are beautiful, sharp, critical, loving * New York Times Book Review *