Andrew's Brain
Published on 16. January 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-1-4087-0498-1 (ISBN)
Description
This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster.
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times-funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew's Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history."
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times-funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew's Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history."
Reviews / Votes
Thirty-nine years after Ragtime, Doctorow is still at it; still ambitious, still sinuous, intimate, conversational -- Jane Smiley * Guardian * Mind-bending and brilliant . . . an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation . . . it fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair. It is a late-career tour de force * Sunday Times * Assured and visually striking * Independent * Ambitious, finely wrought, posing questions that cut to the heart of identity and storytelling * Daily Mail * [Doctorow] is a brilliant, careful observer . . . he has a poet's flair * Times Literary Supplement * Assured in combining the historical and grand with the ordinary and affecting - this is clearly an E. L. Doctorow novel . . . For more than five decades, Doctorow has written novels that jolt American history to life * New Statesman * A sort of Portnoy's Complaint for the brain. Funny, thought-provoking and profound. * Financial Times * A literary imagination that is still probing its capacities. Doctorow, in his ninth decade, is clearly not happy to rest on those considerable laurels * Telegraph *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 154 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
352 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4087-0498-1 (9781408704981)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
E. L. Doctorow's novels include Andrew's Brain, Homer and Langley, The March, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks. Among his honours are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He died in July 2015.