Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious (Author), Grace Metalious (Author), India Knight (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $4.31

  Switch off those TVs, kill your mobiles and settle down with the most controversial book ever written. Once denounced as 'wicked', 'sordid', 'cheap' 'moral filth', PEYTON PLACE was the top read of its time and sold millions of copies worldwide. Way before TWIN PEAKS, SURVIVOR or BIG BROTHER, the curtains were twitching in the mythical New England town of Peyton Place, and this soapy story exposed the dirty secrets of 1950s small-town America: incest, abortion, adultery, repression and lust. Take a peek ...

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.34

  First published in 1956, PEYTON PLACE uncovers the passions, lies and cruelties that simmer beneath the surface of a postcard-perfect town. At the centre of the novel are three women, each with a secret to hide: Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife; her daughter Allison, whose dreams are stifled by small-town small-mindedness; and Selena Cross, her gypsy-eyed friend from the wrong side of the tracks. 'PEYTON PLACE shocked America with its tale of secrets, sex and hypocrisy in a small New Hampshire town . . Saucy, compelling, and surprisingly literary ...A crafty, page-turning brew of illicit sex, secret lives, public drunkenness, abortion, incest and murder ...A scandalous phenomenon' VANITY FAIR

• Used

  Hardcover
  1970

  $3.34

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $19.52

  When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark underside of a small, respectable New England town was published in 1956, it quickly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. A landmark in twentieth-century American popular culture, Peyton Place spawned a successful feature film and a long-running television series the first prime-time soap opera. Contemporary readers of Peyton Place will be captivated by its vivid characters, earthy prose, and shocking incidents. Through her riveting, uninhibited narrative, Metalious skillfully exposes the intricate social anatomy of a small community, examining the lives of its people their passions and vices, their ambitions and defeats, their passivity or violence, their secret hopes and kindnesses, their cohesiveness and rigidity, their struggles, and often their courage. This new paperback edition of Peyton Place features an insightful introduction by Ardis Cameron that thoroughly examines the novel's treatment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and power, and considers the book's influential place in American and New England literary history.