PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
John Cheever (Author) John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature. Julian Barnes (Introducer) Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Legion d'honneur.
[Cheever's] magical capacity for marrying the quotidian with the surreal, so often soars. The new volume feels capacious, stuffed as it is with wonders -- Adam Begley * Sunday Times * One of the great writers of the previous century -- John Self * The Times * Going back to these stories decades after first reading them, I remember what brought me to them in my youth. I loved them because of their relationship to the truth, which is always lurking, waiting to break through the surface of the characters' lives... the way Cheever moved on the page, how he could shift and shift again from paragraph to paragraph, how he could swoop from the mundane to the tragic, which just a comma in between -- Anne Enright * Times Literary Supplement * Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room
