Book description
In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still
has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But
Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by
unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime. Can Sears thwart
the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save
his beloved village?
Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on
everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution
of the ice-skate.
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went
to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of
seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel,
The
Wapshot Chronicle
, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells
Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in
1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer
prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National
Medal for Literature.
