Available Formats
The Book of Daniel
By (Author) E. L. Doctorow
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
6th March 2006
2nd February 2006
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
813.54
Paperback
400
Width 130mm, Height 198mm, Spine 23mm
291g
Published for the first time in Modern Classics alongside Doctorow's Ragtime. As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunning fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, The Book of Daniel is an intensely moving tale of martyrdom and the search for meaning.
" A ferocious feat of the imagination . . . Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole- the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating."
- Newsweek
" A nearly perfect work of art, and art on this level can only be a cause for rejoicing."
- Joyce Carol Oates
" This is an extraordinary contemporary novel, a stunning work."
- San Francisco Chronicle
" The political novel of our age . . . the best work of its kind."
- New Republic
" Remarkable . . . One of the finest works of fiction."
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
" Stirring, brilliant, very moving."
- Houston Post
"From the Hardcover edition."
"From the Hardcover edition."
E.L. Doctorow is one of America's most accomplished and acclaimed living writers. Winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Humanities Medal, he is the author of nine novels that have explored the drama of American life from the late 19th century to the 21st. Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist on the Guardian, for which he once served as US correspondent. He is the author of Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic and, most recently, a family memoir, Jacob's Gift. His first novel is The Righteous Men, published under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.