Marine-turned-novelist Jack Dana is back in Louis Begley's most intense, suspenseful, and deadly adventure yet.With the death of his nemesis, corrupt business mogul Abner Brown, retired Marine Jack Dana thought he could finally return to his peaceful career as a novelist. And after falling hard for Heidi Krohn, the glamorous high-powered lawyer who helped avenge his best friend's death, Jack is beginning to dream of starting a family of his own. But dark forces intervene to upend Jack's comfortable new life. When two of his Uncle Harry's closest friends are brutally murdered in their own home, Jack swears he will get to the bottom of what could have prompted such a vicious attack. The answers he begins to uncover are shocking. A career criminal, long hidden in the shadows of Abner Brown's organization, has gone rogue after his benefactor's death and has made it his mission to get even with the man who ruined Abner: Jack Dana. With the help of his old friends...

Beloved author Louis Begley returns to the monied halls of the Upper East Side with a sharp new comedy of manners. Divorced after decades of comfortable marriage, retired journalist Hugo Gardner sets out to explore paths not travelled.After four decades of what he believes to be a happy, healthy partnership, Hugo Gardner's world is overturned when he learns that his wife, Valerie, is not only requesting a divorce but has left him for a younger, more vital man. Hugo, an octogenarian political writer and retired journalist for Time, must rethink the way he's lived, and reassess how he'd like to spend his remaining years. Reconsidering past relationships in his mind, with years of distance, Hugo begins to see things in a new light: Valerie, whose youth and ambition eventually came between them; his children, whose support might be more financially than emotionally motivated; and his friends, who, like him are rapidly aging before his very eyes. With an...

Master stylist Begley continues the story of Jack Dana, the former Marine Corps officer turned novelist whose quest to avenge his murdered uncle takes a new, more dangerous turn.The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin. But events beyond Jack's control intervene: Kerry loses her life in circumstances that contradict everything Jack thinks he knew about her. Soon death begins to stalk Jack himself. It is impossible not to recognize in its drumbeat the machinations of Abner Brown, the man who orchestrated Harry's demise. Jack fights back, driven by cold rage and determination to complete his revenge. At his side is Kerry's best friend, the...

The prickly beleaguered elderly WASP protagonist of About Schmidt and Schmidt Delivered scrambles for a last chance at love before the sun sets on the Hamptons. When we last saw lawyer Albert Schmidt ("Schmidtie" to all near and dear), he was still reeling from the loss of the paradise he'd found with Carrie, a Hispanic waitress forty years his junior, who finally declined his marriage proposal, and settling into a tenuous truce with his only child, Charlotte, a humorless PR flack for Big Tobacco, who broke his heart by marrying a wonky young (and, ahem, Jewish) associate at Schmidt's white-shoe firm. Now, with both Carrie and Charlotte pregnant, Schmidt faces a life alone, with only the crumbs of grandfatherly status to sustain him. His only hope: the French widow of a former partner--as elusive as she is beautiful. Whether his rusty seduction skills can lure her from Paris to the Hamptons won't be known, though, until Schmidt endures one more ordeal by...

"[A] perfectly constructed novel.... The time is 1974, and Max, who is fleeing from the wreckage of his first marriage, is a summer-house guest on Lake Como, where he encounters the two characters who will shape his life over the next 20 years: Charlie Swan, a Harvard classmate from the 1950s turned famous architect...and Toby, a poised and polymorphous teenager who is soon to become Charlie's protege and lover." --Time

From the author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt, an irresistibly entertaining novel about a man struggling to understand his friends' seemingly charmed marriage, which may have been doomed from the start. In the unforgiving class system of the 1950s, Lucy de Bourgh, daughter of one of Rhode Island's first families and beneficiary of an ample trust fund, was married to Thomas Snow, son of a Newport garage owner and his bookkeeper wife. It hardly mattered that Thomas was a graduate of Harvard Business School, or that he went to work for a great Wall Street firm and succeeded beyond expectations. In Lucy's eyes, he remained irremediably a "townie." Decades later, a chance meeting brings Lucy together with Philip, our narrator. They'd known each other earlier, and he remembers her as a ravishing, funny, ready-for-anything hellion with a well-earned reputation for generosity with sexual favors. He also remembers Thomas, killed in a freak accident years after his and Lucy's divorce, and is shocked to hear Lucy refer to Thomas insistently as "that monster." How is he to reconcile that unexpected and overflowing reservoir of bitterness and resentments with his own memories? Almost against his will, Philip sets out on a quest that soon becomes an obsession to discover who exactly these friends were whom he had understood so incompletely, and what happened in their marriage. Through Philip's patient probing, a brilliant portrait emerges of Begley's heroine: infinitely complex, irresistible as well as insufferable, capable of extremes of arrogance and submission, and driven by sexual appetites she cannot control. Lucy de Bourgh is without doubt one of Begley's strongest and most outrageous creations.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The author of About Schmidt and Shipwreck, Begley returns with an elegant novel of enduring friendship. Sam Standish, the adopted son of an alcoholic banker, arrives at Harvard in the early 1950s in genteel poverty, but with an unexpected trust fund to finance his education. His roommates are the incongruously named Archibald P. Palmer III, an army brat who goes by Archie, and Henry White, a rough-edged, fiercely smart Jewish refugee (born Henryk Weiss in Poland). Sam, who achieves a measure of success as a literary novelist, narrates their 50 years of friendship. His opaque romantic life suggests he may be gay, but the heart of this tragedy of manners is Sam's compelling assessment of class and social cachet in America, and of the ambient anti-Semitism that nearly drives Henry crazy, as he makes and abandons a fortune. Archie drops out of the narrative after he dies in a drunken car accident months after the Kennedy assassination, but Sam and Henry reconnect many years after Henry's disappearance for one last reunion of old friends. It's a story covered by everyone from Cheever to Roth, but Begley finds new and wonderful nuances within it. (Jan. 29) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. FromBegley continues his sojourn among the elite with this absorbing novel about the nature of identity and the costs of assimilation. The novel's narrator is Sam, whose murky parentage and alcoholic parents have tainted his standing among his status-conscious Harvard classmates in the early 1950s. His two roommates are also outsiders--Archie, the spoiled son of an army officer, has a taste for the high life, while the brilliant Henry, a Polish refugee whose family survived the war in hiding, must constantly negotiate the fraught terrain between his devoted parents and his anti-Semitic classmates. Sam and Archie are eager to help Henry fit in, carefully schooling him on manners, clothes, and the right connections. Over the next decades, through, Henry is the one who achieves the greatest worldly success, making his fortune as an international investment banker. But a career snag provokes a much larger crisis, and Henry cuts off all previous ties. In full Henry James mode, Begley uses a lucid prose style to dispassionately eviscerate the upper classes even as he illuminates the true meaning of friendship. Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A mesmerizing novel of deception and betrayal from the acclaimed author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. John North, a prize-winning American writer, is suddenly beset by dark suspicions about the real value of his work. Over endless hours and bottles of whiskey consumed in a mysterious café called L'Entre Deux Mondes, he recounts, in counterpoint to his doubts, the one story he has never told before, perhaps the only important one he will ever tell. North's chosen interlocutor--who could be his doppelgänger--is transfixed by the revelations and becomes the narrator of North's tale. North has always been faithful to his wife, Lydia, but when one of his novels achieves a special success, he allows himself a dalliance with Léa, a starstruck young journalist. Coolly planning to make sure that his life with Lydia will not be disturbed, North is taken off guard when Léa becomes obsessed with him...

From the master observer of upper-crust New York life comes a sly, pacey international thriller ranging from the suites of an elite Manhattan law firm to the tidy elegance of Sag Harbor and the rough and tumble western plains of Brazil. Jack Dana is a star history student at Yale with a bright career in academia ahead of him. But after 9/11 he feels it is his duty to change course. As a Marine infantry officer he is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Severely wounded in combat, he begins writing a novel about his wartime experiences while surgeons at the Walter Reed Hospital patch up his pelvis. Jack then moves to Manhattan to live with his uncle Harry, a partner in a leading New York law firm and Jack's surrogate father. With Harry's help he quickly finds a publisher, and the book's swift success launches Jack as a professional writer. After a second successful publication, Jack feels entitled to a vacation and leaves for a three-month trip to South America....

"Begley writes with a contemplative wisdom that permeates his work....[He] has captured some of the wispy melancholy of midcentury fiction, and this feat in itself is mellifluous to both ear and spirit."THE BOSTON GLOBEA man without a country or family, a Holocaust survivor, Ben long ago left the wreckage of Europe and recreated himself as a brilliant financier. He rejects the comforts of love and is shocked to discover Veronique--beautiful, unwisely married, and all that Ben suddenly knows he has always needed. In their stolen hours and weekends, their deep commitment to one another fills their lives as nothing ever has. But the question remains: Can Ben finally take what he has always denied himself...?From the author of WARTIME LIES.From the Trade Paperback edition.