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The Great Perhaps

The Great Perhaps

by JoeMeno (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2010

    $3.42
Synopsis

Meet the Caspers, a family beset by cowardice and anxiety. Jonathan is a palaeontologist, searching in vain for a prehistoric squid. His wife, Madeline, an animal behaviourist, cannot explain why the pigeons she is studying are becoming increasingly aggressive. Their older daughter Amelia is a disappointed teenage revolutionary, while their younger, Thisbe, has become a devout Christian. Meanwhile, the girls' grandfather, Henry, is slowly absenting himself from life: each day he gives away a possession and speaks one word fewer, until the time comes when he will have spoken his last ever word. Before that can happen, however, Jonathan and Madeline decide to separate - and, suddenly, each family member has to confront their fears about the world in which they live.

Set in the run-up to the 2004 US presidential election, The Great Perhaps is a tale of the nuclear family in the nuclear age; a witty, revealing story about just how complicated and ambiguous modern life can be.

'Darkly funny, lyrical and shrewdly observant' Tom Perrotta

'A big, generous-hearted American family novel . . . Meno's characters bristle with humanity, and I think this book will find a huge audience for its wisdom and life-affirming, but unsentimental, qualities' Irvine Welsh, Daily Telegraph

$3.42

Save:$13.73 (80%)

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 416
 Publisher: Picador
Published: 02 Apr 2010
ISBN 10: 0330512471
ISBN 13: 9780330512473

Media Reviews
A terrible fear of clouds, an obscure search for giant squid and a bomb-building teenage girl: Joe Meno has imagination, humor and the rare ability to make characters seem as near as your own family-sometimes almost too close for comfort. An intriguing and heartfelt book. -- Lydia Millet, author of How the Dead Dream
Joe Meno's fiction has it all--humor and heart, moral gravitas, and a formal playfulness that catches you pleasantly by surprise. -- Ed Park, author of Personal Days
I think The Great Perhaps is the wisest, most humane and transcendent novel on the contemporary family since The Corrections... A marvelous book. -- Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
The Great Perhaps is a darkly funny, lyrical, and shrewdly observant chronicle of a family on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Joe Meno has the rare ability to evoke mid-life melancholy and teenage angst with equal authority. -- Tom Perrotta, author of Election and The Abstinence Teacher
It's insufferable to be forced to live with a crazy family, especially when you refuse to admit your own share of the madness. Joe Meno delivers tenderness and wit to a family struggling to prop up a house of cards. -- G. Xavier Robillard, author of Captain Freedom
Author Bio
Joe Meno is the author of over five novels such as The Great Perhaps,which was a winner of the Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction in 2009 and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His short fiction has been published by the likes of McSweeney's, Witness and TriQuarterly. He is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.