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Cold Spring Harbor
Cold Spring Harbor
Jan 2, 2026 8:04 PM

Author:Richard Yates

Cold Spring Harbor

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple.

Reviews

Yates writes with a sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth, and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure

—— New York Times

So consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic

—— Washington Post

Read and weep

—— Kate Atkinson

Yates's prose is as elegant and minimalist as ever... He simply tells the story - in easily comprehensible but perfectly pitched language

—— Leyla Sanai , www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com

A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology

—— Observer

Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel

—— New York Times Book Review

Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago

—— New York Review of Books

I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form... Wonderful storytelling and characterisation

—— Guardian, Books of the Year

The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time

—— Lisa Jardine

Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force

—— Guardian
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