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A razor-sharp critique of American family life from one of the country’s foremost comic writers, May We Be Forgiven scooped the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and deservedly so. A glorious satirical opus of one man’s struggle through the vicissitudes of life, it is arguable Homes’ finest book to date.
Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood. Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life.
In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death.
But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself.
May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781847083234
Number of pages: 496
Weight: 339 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 31 mm
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“May We be Forgiven”
i bought this book because it won the "orange" prize, winners of which i have enjoyed in the past. It reminded me at first of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, a book i hated, and i thought i was going to be... More

“Wish I'd waited until the hype died down.”
Harry is the older brother of the bullying, violent, egotistical TV executive George and the book opens as he and his Asian wife (the first of the sickening borderline racist stereotypes) are visiting his house for... More
“May We be Forgiven”
This is wonderful. The story of a modern day Job facing all the trials that fate, family and horny middle-aged women can throw at him and coming out the otherside a nicer, kinder and better human being. Everything... More
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