How Far Can You Go?

Description

A novel of satiric insight and comic despair dealing with the lives and loves of ten young Catholics in the 1960s and 70s. Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there's Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question- how far can you go?

David Lodge (CBE)'s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Hilarious...a magnificent book -- Graham Greene Huge, bitterly funny and superbly presented montage of the false nostrums that assailed Christianity like worms * Sunday Times * Funny, sad, knowledgeable * Irish Times * Brilliant and intricate black comedy * Time Out *