The Rowing Lesson - Softcover

Landsman, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847080707 ISBN 13: 9781847080707

Publisher: Granta Books, 2009

Synopsis

Pregnant with her first child, Betsy Klein is summoned from her home in the US to her father's hospital bed in South Africa. Harold Klein is sensual, irascible, a passionately committed doctor, and a complex husband and father. As Betsy sits and waits for him to stir from his coma, she is compelled to imagine his life.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Landsman is the author of the novels The Rowing Lesson and The Devil’s Chimney. The Rowing Lesson was awarded South Africa’s two top literary awards—the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and South Africa’s 2009 M-Net Literary Award for English fiction—and was shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Award nominations for The Devil’s Chimney include the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has contributed essays to the anthologies Touch, An Uncertain Inheritance and The Honeymoon’s Over and has written for numerous publications including Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Guardian and The Telegraph. Born in South Africa, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
From the Hardcover edition.

Review

Winner of the South African M-Net Literary Prize Winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
Shortlisted for the Harold U. Ribalow Prize
Top 29 Financial Times Fiction Books of the Year Selection
Top 10 Times South African Books of the Year Selection

“Visceral. . . . Intensely exhilarating.”—The New York Times Book Review 

“Amazing.”—Los Angeles Times 

“The beauty of The Rowing Lesson is in its fluid metaphors, its urgent storytelling . . . and the lyric desperation of a daughter’s love.”—O Magazine 

“Rarely in South African writing will we encounter language of such fire and passion.”—J.M. Coetzee 

“Beautiful. . . . Unfailingly original.”—Jennifer Egan 

“Like Joyce or William Gass or John Edgar Wideman, Anne Landsman fashions a sensual web of memory and desire, rescuing a world on the brink of extinction through the power of her lyricism.”—Stewart O’Nan 

“A tour de force.”—Roxana Robinson 

“An adventure in language. . . . It makes art of life.”—Louis Menand
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1847080707
• ISBN 13: 9781847080707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288