The latest offering from the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin. A dazzling novel with perceptive insights on love and marriage. As you'd expect from a past winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Shriver's writing is spellbinding. Even if you hate tennis with a passion, you won't be able to put this down.
'Love me, love my game', says twenty-three year-old Willy Novinsky. Ever since she picked up a racquet at the age of four, tennis has been Willy's one love, until the day she meets Eric Oberdorf. She's a middle-ranked professional tennis player and he's a Princeton graduate who took up playing tennis at the age of eighteen. Low-ranked but untested, Eric, too, aims to make his mark on the international tennis circuit. Willy beholds compatibility spiced with friendly rivalry, and discovers her first passion outside a tennis court. They marry. Married life starts well, but animated shop talk and blissful love-making soon give way to full-tilt competition over who can rise to the top first. Driven and gifted, Willy maintains the lead until she severs her knee ligaments in a devastating spill. As Willy recuperates, her ranking plummets whilst her husband's climbs, until he is eventually playing in the US Open. Anguished at falling short of her lifelong dream and resentful of her husband's success, Willy slides irresistibly toward the first quiet tragedy of her young life.
“This book is about the small and large ways we hurt each other in the greatest competition on the face of the earth: Love. Buy it. It belongs on the shelf of books you will return to again and again†Harry Crews
“Shriver confronts some disconcerting truths that defy a pat politically correct resolution†The New York Times Book Review
“A moving, resonant tale of two sparkling careers and two decent people unable to live in harmony†Kirkus Reviews
Author
About Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver's novels include the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and has now sold over a million copies worldwide. Other books include Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, and So Much for That. Lionel’s novels have been translated into twenty-five different languages and. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London.
