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Prosperous Friends

By Christine Schutt
Prosperous Friends by Christine  Schutt digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

“[A] revelation…a devastating story of young love, old love, and no love” by a National Book Award finalist (The New Yorker, Best Books of the Year).


Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, doubt and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future will finally give way to a deepened and mature perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, Dinah, a poet. With compassionate insight, Christine Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah who seem to prosper in love—and those like Ned and Isabel who feel condemned to yearn for it.

“By turn poetically mesmeric and brutally unsentimental…a beautiful but disquieting novel about broken vows and hearts.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A glancing, impressionistic style that owes a happy debt to Virginia Woolf…genuine moments of beauty and hope."—The Wall Street Journal

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4 Reviews

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“What was the point of the book, the resonating message I'm supposed to be left with? It's so vague. I don't like any of the characters and I don't know why the main couple bothered to get married in the first place. I understand more of why Dinah married James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card. It's definitely meant to be read at night. The words flow in a really nice way sometimes, lulling. But during the day, I'm a bit jarred by the body shaming and the fact that these people are really awful to their core. And there is this line about Haitians and Guatemalans and white folks that rubs me the wrong way. I have no idea what the author meant by it because there's no context surrounding it. It just is.”
“Finished it, but hated it. Didn't like the style, didn't even understand the characters or what was happening, much less like them.”

About Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. The former was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Schutt’s first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist for fiction in 2004, and her second novel, All Souls, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction in 2009. Her latest novel, Prosperous Friends, is out now from Grove Press.

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