The End of Alice
Published on 5. June 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-1-86207-890-1 (ISBN)
Description
"The End of Alice" treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday and caused a major controversy when it was first released in the US. The story centres on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third year in prison; the other, his bland-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, is a nineteenth-year-old woman intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Slowly, through these letters, the narrator's monstrous character emerges.
Reviews / Votes
"* 'A.M. Homes never plays it safe and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything' Michael Cunningham * 'If the first major literary marker of the American dream of aspiration, potential and never-ending youth was F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyrical piece of doomed yearning, The Great Gatsby, its postmodern flipside [is] A.M. Homes's The End of Alice, whose paired literary voices made a grotesque harmony of two yearners after the dream of youth' Ali Smith, Guardian * 'A.M. Homes instructs us about ourselves and shows us what we are blighted with and cringe from, our compulsions, repressions, longings, glimpses of madness' Ruth Rendell * 'Undeniably shocking... Superbly achieved by a writer who is a true artist in words' Vogue"More details
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Person
AM Homes is the author of several novels -, In a Country of Mothers, Music for Torching, and Jack - and two collections of short stories, The Safety of Objects and the recent highly acclaimed Things You Should Know all published by Granta. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and teaches in the writing programme at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Her latest novel, This Book Will Save Your Life is published by Granta this month.