Published: 01/04/2021
ISBN: 9781783787166
Granta Books
256 pages

The End Of Alice

A.M. Homes

The End of Alice treads the 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 slang-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, is a nineteen-year-old girl intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Slowly, through these letters, the narrator’s dangerous character emerges.

A.M. Homes never plays it safe and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything

Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

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] 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

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

The Author

A. M. Homes is the author of the novels,This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers and Jack, and three collections of short stories, Days of Awe, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects and the highly acclaimed memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, as well as the travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes frequently on arts and culture for numerous magazines and newspapers. She lives in New York City.