The End Of The Alphabet | Granta

  • Published: 02/03/2009
  • ISBN: 9781846271113
  • 129x20mm
  • 128 pages

The End Of The Alphabet

C.S. Richardson

Some time around his fiftieth birthday, Ambrose Zephyr fails his annual medical check-up. An illness of inexplicable origin with no known or foreseeable cure is diagnosed and it will kill him within a month. Give or take a day. In the time that remains, he decides to travel to all the places he has most loved or ever wanted to visit, in strict alphabetical order. And so Ambrose and his wife Zipper embark on a strange adventure that takes them further and further away from home and doesn’t quite turn out as either of them had expected.

This book promises enchantment as soon as you pick it up

Claire Rayner

A stunning accomplishment. To say so much in so few words is breathtaking. If Alphabet doesn't become the next Tuesdays with Morrie, there's something wrong with the world. Though it's nothing like Tuesdays - because it's so much more. Give it to the one you love; to someone who has lost, or is losing, someone; and to anyone who needs to hope, who needs to cry, or who needs to really dream. It's that powerful

Publishers Weekly

An elegant, spare and beautifully written tale. The surprise of this little book is not that it is poignant but that it is delightful: graceful, stylish, humorous, and intelligent - each page shimmers with life at its gentle, everyday best

Washington Post

The Author

CS Richardson‘s first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller published in thirteen countries and ten languages. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Canada & the Caribbean), it was named to four Best of the Year lists and was adapted for radio drama by BBC’s Radio 4. Richardson is also an accomplished and award-winning book designer. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

The Emperor of Paris

C.S. Richardson

Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre Dame bakery and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found… Evocative, romantic, and wise, this is a magical novel about the power of stories – to help us find enchantment, freedom, and sometimes even love.