ISBN: 9780099518631    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2008     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 336        Language: English

Robert Prentice is eighteen, and his boyhood dreams have disintegrated on the battlefields of Europe. At home, his mother, Alice, wraps herself in fantasy against the relentless disappointments of life.From his compelling portraits of these two damaged souls, Richard Yates creates a brilliant novel of post-war America, at odds with its own identity, striving to combine prosperity and ideals, mercilessly exposed in the attempt to do so. At once tender and ironic, bitterly sad and achingly funny, A' Special Providence' is the second novel by the author of 'Revolutionary Road'.
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Richard Yates was born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York.After serving in the US Army during the Second World War, he worked as a publicity writer for the Remington Rand Corporation, and for a brief period in the sixties as a speech writer for Senator Robert Kennedy. His prize-winning stories first appeared in 1953 and his first novel, 'Revolutionary Road', was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961.He is the author of eight other works, including the novels 'A Good School', 'The Easter Parade' and 'Disturbing the Peace', and two collections of short stories, 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' and 'Liars in Love'.Richard Yates was twice divorced and the father of three daughte He died in 1992. Lionel Shriver was born in the United States and now lives in London. She is the author of 'The Female of the Species, Checker and the Derailleurs,' 'The Bleeding Heart' , 'Ordinary Decent Criminals, A Perfectly Good Family, Double Fault', 'The Post-Birthday World' and 'So Much for That'. Her seventh novel, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.
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