Una dramática historia sentimental ambientada en la Nueva York de los años 50, escrita por uno de los grandes autores estadounidenses.
Nueva York, víspera de Acción de Gracias de 1945. La guerra ha terminado y la fiesta de Eric Smythe está en pleno auge. Todos sus amigos de Greenwich Village, en el corazón bohemio de Manhattan, están ahí. También su hermana Sara, una joven independiente y despierta que empieza a abrirse camino en la gran ciudad. La irrupción de Jack Malone, un periodista del ejército estadounidense recién vuelto de Alemania, marca el inicio de una vertiginosa historia de amor.
Ambientado en la América de los años cincuenta, entre el dinámico optimismo de posguerra y la caza de brujas de McCarthy, En busca de la felicidad es un drama familiar forjado con lealtades contrapuestas, decisiones morales y destinos azarosos. Un relato épico e íntimo tremendamente conmovedor.
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Great Wide Open written by Douglas Kennedy, read by Regina Reagan.
"All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare, governed by their own rules . . ."
It's 1980s New York. Heady, excessive times. Alice Burns - a young book editor - is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations resonates, perhaps because she has just watched her own family implode.
As she reads she wonders: When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice?
Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school bullying, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970's Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan. But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers; how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others.
The Great Wide Open is an immensely ambitious and compulsive saga; a novel which will speak volumes to anyone who has marvelled at that pain that can only be caused by family itself.
Robin knew Paul wasn't perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true.
In the heady strangeness of Morocco, he is everything she wants him to be - passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant.
But when Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry, everything changes.
As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.
With his acclaimed ability to write page-turners that also make you think, Douglas Kennedy takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: what would you do if your life depended on it?
'Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women' Daily Mirror
'Kennedy is an absolute master at love stories with heart-stopping twists' The Times
'Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story.' Esquire
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness and The Moment comes a poignant and profound American love story.
How long does it take to fall in love?
For twenty years, Laura has been a good wife and a good mother. She's supported her husband through redundancy, she's worried about her son, she's encouraged her daughter.
She's stopped thinking about all the places she'd like to go and all the books she'd like to talk about.
She's not unhappy, exactly. She's not that self-indulgent. As anyone would tell you, Laura is wonderfully constant, caring, selfless. She's certainly an expert at putting on a brave face.
But a chance meeting in a hotel lobby - and the five days that follow - remind Laura of the young woman she used to be - and the woman she could have become.
Is it ever too late to have the life you wanted? Or do we owe it to ourselves to pursue the promise of happiness?
From 'the absolute master of love stories with heart-stopping twists' (The Times), Five Days is a compelling novel about how life can change with one brief encounter.
Laura spends her days looking at other people's potential calamities. She works in the radiography unit of a small hospital on the Maine coast, bearing constant witness to the fears of patient after frightened patient. In a job where finding nothing is always the best possible outcome, she is well versed in the random injustices of life, a truism that has lately been playing out in her marriage as well. Since being downsized, her husband, Dan, has become withdrawn, his emotional distance gradually corroding their relationship. With a son in college and a daughter soon due to leave home, Laura has begun to fear that the marital sounds of silence will only deepen once the nest is truly empty. When an opportunity arises to attend a weekend medical conference in Boston, Laura jumps at this respite from home. While checking in, she meets a man as gray and uninspired as her drab hotel room. Richard is an outwardly dull, fiftysomething insurance salesman. But during a chance second encounter, Laura discovers him to be surprisingly complex and thoughtful, someone who, like herself, is grappling with the same big questions about decisions made and the human capacity for self-entrapment. As their conversation deepens and begins to veer into shared confessions, the overwhelming sense of personal and intimate connection arises. A transformative love affair begins. But can this potential, much-longed-for happiness be married to their own difficult personal circumstances? Can they upend their lives and embrace that most loaded of words: change? A love story as clear-sighted and ruminative as it is affecting, Five Days will have you reflecting about the choices we all make that shape our destinies. Crafted with Kennedy's trademark evocative prose and pitch-perfect in its depiction of the complex realities of modern life, it is a novel that speaks directly to the many contradictions of the human heart.
Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin - at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War.
Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person - and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann - the woman to whom he lost his heart - was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams... and one which gradually rewrote both their destinies.
In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written that rare thing: a love story as morally complex as it is tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, it is an atmospherically dense, ethically tangled tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly rendered portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before The Wall came down.
Like all of Kennedy's previous, critically acclaimed bestselling novels, The Moment is both unputdownable and profound. Posing so many searching questions about why and how we fall in love - and the tangled way we project on to others that which our hearts seek - it is a love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power.
THE PAY WAS GOOD. THE PRICE WAS MURDER.
Ned Allen is a young, upwardly mobile ad salesman for a successful computer magazine. Several years into his career, he's confident that he's finally left his small-town roots behind, and that the sophisticated Manhattan world he covets is his forever. His wife, Lizzie, is also flourishing at a prestigious public relations firm. Life, it seems, is just where they want it -- until Ned is faced with a seemingly clearcut moral choice that pulls the bottom out from under his feet.
Ned's company is sold and his world is suddenly turned upside down. Salvation appears in the unlikely form of an old high school friend who is working for lack Ballantine, a former real estate tycoon with a shady past who has recently made a much-heralded comeback. When, against his better judgement, Ned accepts a job working for Ballantine's latest venture, an offshore private equity fund, he tells himself it's just another job. But it turns out that Ballantine has other uses for Ned....
An adrenaline-pumping thriller, The Job is destined to catapult Kennedy into the ranks of bestsellers like Grisham and Turow.
