This Book Will Save Your Life | Granta

  • Published: 16/08/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847082923
  • Granta Books
  • 380 pages

This Book Will Save Your Life

A.M. Homes

This Book Will Save Your Life is an uplifting story about one man’s efforts to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern-day everyman, a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home in Los Angeles who needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide sinkhole appears outside his living-room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open yourself up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of this touching and funny novel, which was shortlisted for the Richard & Judy Book Club in 2007.

A. M. Homes' new novel is weird and warm and wise and really rather wonderful

Mark Haddon

Witty and well written while in pursuit of the spirits living inside the machine

Times

Homes is excellent on the inner workings of men

Time Out

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.

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The File: Lost Then Found

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‘Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments, like shrapnel, that push to the surface without warning.’