The Married Man

Description

A searingly honest love story told in White's characteristically beautiful, heart-breaking prose. 'Poignant and challenging...A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound' Daily Telegraph Austin Smith, a middle aged American, works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance. As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, they deal with comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara where their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical sequence A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Noctunes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about America - States of Desire - and of Sketches from Memory, with Hubert Sorin. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

Written with the characteristic brilliance and the particular flair for poetic detail that so distinguishes his books, Edmund White's new novel is arguably his best to date... Heartbreakingly beautiful prose, so elegantly achieved it has the ring of a master...marvellously life-affirming... In short, nothing less than brilliant * The Times * A superb novel * Evening Standard * Undoubtedly one of his best novels. The prose is lyrical...writing that is truly supple, adapting itself to comedy or tragedy as required * Sunday Times * The Married Man is Edmund White at his quintessential best * Sunday Telegraph * Poignant and challenging... Candid and often painfully personal... A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound * Daily Telegraph *