Bøger af Jonathan Dee

“This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number.” —Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner PartyIn Jonathan Dee’s elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator’s attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city. With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero’s former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.

Though perhaps less well-known here than its Western counterpart, Chinese astrology is every bit as illuminating and provides an equally valuable shortcut to self-knowledge. Jonathan Dee, the well-respected author of several books on astrology, tarot, and fortune-telling, reveals all the mysteries of the art in this informative volume.

A guide to the secrets of rune-reading, an ancient predictive art, that teaches you how to lay out runes and interpret them instantly.

';Summons up a small American town at precisely the right moment in our history . . . a bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.'George SaundersA rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our timesfiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan.A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round ';secure location' from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people's money. The collision of these two men's very different worldsrural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthyis the engine of Jonathan Dee's powerful new novel. Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen's objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt. Then the town's first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his imagewith unexpected results for Mark and his extended family. Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century Americarising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianismplayed out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time. Praise for The Locals';After 9/11, New York hedge fund billionaire Philip Hadi retreats to his summer home in the Berkshires. In thrall to his new town, he runs for office to keep it sleepy, sweet and free from tax hikes. Is he benevolent, arrogant or both? No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.'People (Book of the Week) ';Thoughtful . . . [Jonathan Dee's] prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving. . . . Amid the heat of today's vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.'Ron Charles, The Washington Post

A rural, working class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this urgent and inspired novel for our times.

Combining finely tuned suspense with provocative insights into the nature of good and evil, The Liberty Campaign is a novel of stunning psychological depth and power.Gene Trowbridge, a sixty-five-year-old successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and considering the future. A deliberate and thoughtful man, Gene lives a solid, peaceful existence with his wife in a genteel Long Island suburb, watching on television the failure of his son Jack's professional baseball career and increasingly aware of his own displacement in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's world. From the scandal that comes to surround Ferdinand, Gene is brought face to face with the unimaginable depths of cruelty that lie well beyond his complacent suburban community. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by self-doubt stemming from his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man of potentially indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past. In The Liberty Campaign, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Dee has created one of the wisest and most memorable voices in recent fiction. When Gene is ultimately presented with a stark ethical choice and forced to reevaluate his judgment and his principles, Dee captures, with extraordinary precision and power, the vulnerable time in the life of an aging man when he falters, not sure that his own life experience has provided him with the ability to act. The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.

A practical guide on how to work out your Chinese horoscope.

Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point. Once a privileged and loving couple, widely envied and respected, it takes just one afternoon - and a single act of recklessness - for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together.Separated from her husband, Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave their family home for Manhattan, where Helen must build a new life for them both. Thrust back into the working world, Helen takes a job in PR - her first in many years - and discovers she has a rare gift: she can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Faced with the fallout from her own marriage, and her daughter's increasingly distant behaviour, Helen finds that the capacity for forgiveness she nurtures so successfully in her professional life is far harder to apply to her personal one.A Thousand Pardons is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction.Praise for Jonathan Dee:'A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.' Jonathan Franzen.'Dee is graceful; articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny... full of elegance, vitality and complexity.' New York Times.'The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer.' Richard Ford.'The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love. The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.' Jay McInerney.

Smart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five. Adam is a rising star in the world of private equity and becomes his boss's prot g . With a beautiful home in the upper-class precincts of Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable standard, successful.But the Moreys' standard is not the same as other people's. The future in which they have always believed for themselves and their children - a life of almost boundless privilege, in which any desire can be acted upon and any ambition made real - is still out there, but it is not arriving fast enough to suit them. As Cynthia, at home with the kids day after identical day, begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a decision that tests how much he is willing to risk to ensure his family's happiness and to recapture the sense that, for him and his wife, the only acceptable life is oneof infinite possibility.The Privileges is an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and guided above all else by their epic love for each other. Lyrical, provocative, and brilliantly imagined, it is a timely meditation on wealth, family, and what it means to leave the world richer than you found it.

Gene Trowbridge, a successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and contemplating the future, increasingly aware of his own irrelevance in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbour who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's cosseted world. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man apparently capable of indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past.The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.