The first book in John Updike's award-winning 'Rabbit' series, with an afterword by the authorIt's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, b...

In his extraordinary and highly charged new novel, John Updike tackles one of America's most burning issues – the threat of Islamist terror from within. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Terrorist traces the journey of one young man, from radicalism to fundamentalism to terrorism, against the backdrop of a fraying urban landscape and an increasingly fragmented community. In beautiful prose, Updike dramatizes the logic of the fundamentalist terrorist – but also suggests ways in which...

An intoxicating yet sensitive novel about the sexual experiences of ten couples from Tarbox, New England. Well-to-do, sociable, articulate but dangerously unfulfilled; they play word games in the evening and adultery all year round.

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young bl...

The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers — a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final daysIn the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was ‘Our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer’.Over the course of his long and immensely...

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio, luring them to his mansions...

Collected together for the first time on audio, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike's career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding ...

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is...

'There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life - impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular-reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past.'In these two short stories, Updike's brilliant observational acuity is matched by a light, comic touch. The writer Henry Bech travels to Europe on a hapless cultural exchange, first ...

This well-known short story appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, one of John Updike's earliest books and is narrated by a divinity student at his summer job. From the heights of his wooden throne, the fastidious and aloof young narrator delivers a silent sermon addressed to the beachgoers—"the middle-aged, burdened with children and aluminum chairs." Though full of himself and his mission, he appeals to us by virtue of his earnestness and promise, and the call for which h...

'Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.'As an earnest golfer for over forty years, John Updike wrote frequently about the game. In Golf Dreams, Updike directs his inimitable style, his humour and shrewd insights towards a sport that, in turns, enthralled and infuriated him. This gathering of his pieces covers everything from the peculiar charms of bad g...

“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“Here Come the Maples”). “They also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared.” That all blessings are mixed and fleeting does not make them less real, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, th...