On New Year’s Eve, four strangers make their way to the rooftop of a London apartment building called Toppers’ House. Their goal, however, is not celebration but obliteration. For various reasons, each one has decided that the time has come to put an end to his or her life. As they inadvertently meet and begin to share their stories, they find themselves citizens of a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer apply. And gradually, very gradually, they help one another to discover reasons to live, at least for the time being.
Hornby tells his story through the alternating, idiosyncratic voices of his four main characters. There is Maureen, the mousy, fifty-something mother of a mentally and physically incapacitated son, who has done little but care for him for the past twenty years; Martin, a disgraced former TV morning show host and ex-con; Jess, an obnoxious and explosive teenager; and JJ, the lone American in the bunch, an aspiring rock star.
New York has called Nick Hornby “a fine writer, swift and pointed, with a lighter, more mischievous heart than he lets on, and more sympathy for the devil than he admits to.” According to the New York Daily News, Hornby is “a sympathetic writer who actually likes the people whose stories he chooses to tell.” Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in his keenly awaited fourth novel.
In A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby poses deep questions about suffering, evil, spirituality, and the possibility of redemption with a deft, sly wit, an acute intelligence, and a contemporary cultural sensibility that are uniquely his. Challenging, tender, profane, ribald, acerbic, uplifting, and laugh-out-loud funny, it is a novel about suicide that turns out to have much more to do with life.
You pay $13
You get back $7
Status: Available
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