Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point and it takes one afternoon – and a single act of recklessness – for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together.
Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave for Manhattan where Helen takes a job in PR – her first in many years – and discovers she has a gift for spinning crises into second chances. But can she apply her professional talent to her personal life?
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.
Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave for Manhattan where Helen takes a job in PR – her first in many years – and discovers she has a gift for spinning crises into second chances. But can she apply her professional talent to her personal life?
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.
Reviews
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.
Slickly written and great entertainment.
Dee is an expert at encapsulating the vacuous marriage of two WASPs.
Totally gripping.
Deliciously readable.
Jonathan Dee is a master of writing about the midlife crises behind the white picket fences.
Guilt, redemption and the American dream of starting afresh are Pulitzer-Prize nominee Jonathan Dee's themes in this thoroughly enjoyable comic tale.
The novel is brief, pacy, intelligent.
...shrewdly observed and compulsively readable.
The American novelist who has his finger on the pulse.
Jonathan Dee’s sensitively observed tale of three people whose lives are in crisis and who flounder after the disintegration of a marriage is gripping and thought-provoking.
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.
This is a sophisticated, post-Updike story of a marriage...an engaging, intriguing read.
Part relationship drama, part thriller, this is one of our favourite books of the year so far.
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.
With his sixth novel, Pulitzer finalist Dee has written a page turner without sacrificing a smidgen of psychological insight. What a triumph.
A Thousand Pardons has already received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic...A must-read for fans of Jonathan Franzen