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Published Jun 2010
512 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Paperback Original. On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents: she would never get married, and she would never have children.
But life, as Jane comes to discover, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then Jane becomes pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise—but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.
Just when she has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for some sort of personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision—stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.
Leaving the World is a riveting portrait of a brilliant woman that reflects the way we live now, of the many routes we follow in the course of a single life, and of the arbitrary nature of destiny. A critically acclaimed international bestseller, it is also a compulsive read and one that speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.
"Episodically structured yet with a strong narrative drive, this is a book with lasting impact: powerful, provocative, and tender." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. In this surging epic, a veritable decathlon of the spirit, Kennedy incisively dramatizes the enigma of chance, petty cruelty, and catastrophic evil, “unalloyed grief,” and the tensile strength concealed beneath our obvious vulnerability." - Booklist
"A sententious tendency to editorialise about abstracts – money, loss, relationships and so on – and a continual anxious fingering of great writers – Eliot, Shakespeare, Graham Greene – like rosary beads, leaves the impression that Kennedy would like Leaving the World to be considered as Great Literature. It isn’t that. But it is Great Entertainment." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Kennedy keeps us wanting to know what happens next. ... It's tempting to criticise this book as manipulative, but being taken advantage is exactly what we pay him to do." - The Independent (UK)
"The only people who will not instantly adore this book are those who are squeamish about lost hedge-funds or missing children. For everyone else it may well be the most thrilling 450 pages they will read all year. Don't get on a long-haul flight without it, I say." - The Times (UK)
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Paul Stuart
Douglas Kennedy is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, Leaving the World and The Moment. His latest novel, The Heat of Betrayal, is now available in English and in French as Mirage (with an American publication in Feb. 2016 under the title, The Blue Hour). He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. Several of his novels have been filmed, including The Big Picture (starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve) and The Woman in the Fifth (with Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas).
Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children, Max and Amelia, and currently divides his time between Manhattan, Paris, London, Montreal and Maine
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Douglas Kennedy's Website
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