: Kate Greathead
: The Book of George A Sunday Times hottest new book of 2025
: Atlantic Books
: 9781805463269
: 1
: CHF 11.70
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 288
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'A smart, funny and surprisingly moving read for fans of Dolly Alderton' THE I PAPER 'A commercial-literary gem for fans of Kiley Reid, Curtis Sittenfeld and Alison Espach' PANDORA SYKES 'If you're honest, you'll admit that you've raised George or dated George or, worse, you are George' WASHINGTON POST 'This book is a knockout' MARIA SEMPLE 'An excellent novel...as convincing as it is moving' ADELLE WALDMAN 'Perceptive, funny and tender' ALISON ESPACH We all know a George. He's the kind of guy who's brimming with potential but incapable of following through; he doesn't know if he's in love with his girlfriend, but he certainly likes having her around; he's distant from - but still reliant on - his mother; he swears he'll finish his novel one day. Sure, you might find him disappointing. But no one is more disappointed in George than George himself. As funny as it is astute and as singular as it is universal, The Book of George is a deft, unexpectedly moving never-coming-of-age tale and a portrait of one man, but also countless others.

Kate Greathead is the author of Laura& Emma. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times and on PRX's The Moth Radio Hour. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Teddy Wayne, and their children.

1. THE SHOPPING PROBLEM


George, 12–18


To George’s D.A.R.E. graduation in the Cochran Gym, his father wore a suit. The suit hadn’t registered as embarrassing to George, who couldn’t even remember what it looked like when he overheard his mother mention it to a friend on the phone later that week, but from her derisive tone in describing it—custom-made, seersucker, J. Press—he understood that there was something inherently foolish about it. Or perhaps it was his father’s wearing it to such a silly occasion: George and his classmates on the bleachers singing a song about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, the culmination of the substance-abuse unit of their seventh-grade health class.

George struggled to grasp the nuances of his mother’s contempt, but it was the beginning of his awareness of a problem in his parents’ marriage that had to do with his father’s love of expensive clothes.

Ellen didn’t discuss it with her kids, but she wasn’t exactly sotto voce when venting to her friends on the phone, and there were certain cutting remarks that George wished he hadn’t heard.Not normal. Shopping the way a woman shops—a woman with a shopping problem.

It was hard for George to imagine his mother having any vices. Ellen, who wore very little makeup and had let her hair go gray, rolled her eyes when people referred to her as beautiful, but she maintained the body of the ballet dancer she’d been in her youth and there was an awareness of her own grace in the way she moved. Her posture could be forbidding. She had a way of silently materializing at the threshold of her children’s rooms at incriminating moments, though she rarely intervened beyond expressing her opinion.

“It’s just not very attractive,” she’d told Cressida the first time she’d caught her smoking.

George recalled, as a young child, a tender, involved mother, but as he got older she withdrew. By the time he and Cressida were teenagers, Ellen seemed to view them as fully formed people who were going to do what they were going to do. She supported their endeavors and applauded their successes, but their accomplishments were not a particular source of pride for her. Nor was she incline