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Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point. Once a privileged and loving couple, widely envied and respected, it takes just one afternoon – and a single act of recklessness – for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together.
Separated from her husband, Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave their family home for Manhattan, where Helen must build a new life for them both. Thrust back into the working world, Helen takes a job in PR – her first in many years – and discovers she has a rare gift: she can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances.
Faced with the fallout from her own marriage, and her daughter’s increasingly distant behaviour, Helen finds that the capacity for forgiveness she nurtures so successfully in her professional life is far harder to apply to her personal one.
A Thousand Pardons is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction.
Praise for Jonathan Dee:
‘A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.’ Jonathan Franzen.
‘Dee is graceful; articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny… full of elegance, vitality and complexity.’ New York Times.
‘The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer.’ Richard Ford.
‘The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love. The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.’ Jay McInerney.
Separated from her husband, Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave their family home for Manhattan, where Helen must build a new life for them both. Thrust back into the working world, Helen takes a job in PR – her first in many years – and discovers she has a rare gift: she can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances.
Faced with the fallout from her own marriage, and her daughter’s increasingly distant behaviour, Helen finds that the capacity for forgiveness she nurtures so successfully in her professional life is far harder to apply to her personal one.
A Thousand Pardons is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction.
Praise for Jonathan Dee:
‘A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.’ Jonathan Franzen.
‘Dee is graceful; articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny… full of elegance, vitality and complexity.’ New York Times.
‘The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer.’ Richard Ford.
‘The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love. The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.’ Jay McInerney.
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Reviews
...guilt, redemption and the American dream of starting afresh are Pulitzer-Prize nominee Jonathan Dee's themes in this thoroughly enjoyable comic tale.
With his sixth novel, Pulitzer finalist Dee has written a page turner without sacrificing a smidgen of psychological insight. What a triumph.
Dee is adept at meshing the complexities of marriage and family life with the paradoxes of the zeitgeist. In his sixth meticulously lathed and magnetizing novel, he riffs on the practice of crisis management.... [and] nets the absurdities of a society geared to communicate in a thousand electronic modes while those closest to each other can barely make eye connect.
Part relationship drama, part thriller, this is one of our favourite books of the year so far.
...shrewdly observed and compulsively readable.
A punch in the face of the American Dream, this is a timely meditation on public apology and absolution that suggests you don’t have to forget in order to forgive – or, indeed, forgive in order to forget.
A Thousand Pardons is that rare thing: a genuine literary thriller. Eerily suspenseful and packed with dramatic event, it also offers a trenchant, hilarious portrait of our collective longing for authenticity in these over-mediated times.