Author:Richard Yates

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.
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 TimesSo consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic
—— Washington PostRead and weep
—— Kate AtkinsonYates'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.comA magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology
—— ObserverRoth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel
—— New York Times Book ReviewRoth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago
—— New York Review of BooksI 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 YearThe 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 JardineRoth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force
—— Guardian






