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    Double Fault
    Double Fault
    Double Fault
    Audiobook12 hours

    Double Fault

    Written by Lionel Shriver

    Narrated by Renee Raudman

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “Shriver shows in a masterstroke why character is fate and how sport reveals it.” —New York Times Book Review

    From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin comes a brilliant and unflinching novel about the devastating cost of prizing achievement over love

    Tennis has been Willy Novinsky's one love ever since she first picked up a racquet at the age of four. A middle-ranked pro at twenty-three, she's met her match in Eric Oberdorf, a low-ranked, untested Princeton grad who also intends to make his mark on the international tennis circuit. Eric becomes Willy's first passion off the court, and eventually they marry. But while wedded life begins well, full-tilt competition soon puts a strain on their relationship—and an unexpected accident sends driven and gifted Willy sliding irrevocably toward resentment, tragedy, and despair.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2009
    ISBN9781423397052
    Double Fault
    Author

    Lionel Shriver

    Although Lionel Shriver has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, she in no way wishes for the inclusion of this information to imply that she is more “intelligent” or “accomplished” than anyone else. The outdated meritocracy of intellectual achievement has made her a bestselling author multiple times and accorded her awards, including the Orange Prize, but she accepts that all of these accidental accolades are basically meaningless. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Double Fault

    3/5

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    • 5/5
      Lionel Shriver’s books always seem to be about crumbling relationships. She gets into her subject matter in all its details, right under the skin of every character, every action or comment is viewed under the microscope. You have to like them to like this book. Happily I did, though I struggled throughout with the principal female character being called Willy. I can accept Lionel, at a stretch, being a woman’s name, but Willy??? This is a book where you can take sides. Tennis playing girl meets tennis playing boy, they fall in love, get married, it affects their tennis rankings, everything starts going pear shaped. Though I thought Willy behaved pretty badly nothing is clear cut, and every step of the way I could imagine being in her shoes and feeling just the same.It is instructive about the game of tennis at grass roots level, and after reading it I will never look at those qualifiers who lose in the first round of Wimbledon in quite the same way again.
    • 3/5
      I read this book because I immensely enjoyed two of Lionel Shriver's other books -- The Post-Birthday World and We Need to Talk About Kevin. Usually when I find a book that I like, I immediately try to find other books by the author and read them. Although I enjoyed this book, I didn't find it as intriguing or involving as her others. (And, yes, the author is a woman -- I just assumed it was a man when I began The Post-Birthday World and kept thinking "This guy can really write from a woman's point of view" but then later found out it was a woman!) Anyway, I'm not saying this is a bad book by any means...just that I didn't love it as much as the two others I have read.This book is about a marriage and tennis. The protagonist is a semi-professional tennis player named Willy Novinsky. Willy has lived and breathed tennis since she was a young girl and has centered her whole life on being a successful professional tennis player. When she meets Eric Oberdorf during an impromptu tennis game at Riverside Park, she is intrigued by his natural talent and his good looks. He is intrigued by her. Because she's never made room in her life for romance, it seems like a match made in heaven to find a man who admires her tennis game and shares her interest in tennis. Eric begins pursuing tennis as a profession as his natural talent begins to blossom. They fall in love and marry. And things are good...until Eric's career begins to eclipse Willy's career...At its heart, the book is about Willy's struggle to come to terms with her life ... as a wife, as a tennis player, and as a woman. I loved that she wasn't a "typical" woman that you often find in books. She is a competitive woman who wants to win. Who values tennis more than anything in the world -- possibly even her husband. Her struggle to come to terms with these issues is very interesting but painful to watch. As someone who has never been very passionate about a career, I struggled to watch Willy deal with her loss of identity as her tennis career begins to falter. Willy isn't a completely sympathetic character, and I often found myself struggling to like her. But at the end, I found myself wanting to know what the future held for her.Although this wasn't my favorite book of Lionel Shriver's, it was a good read. If you are particularly fond of tennis, you might find even more to love about this book. All in all, I give the book a C ranking.
    • 3/5
      Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault is a story of a couple who are trying to make a mark in the field of international tennis. While Willy has been playing with a racket since five, Eric, picks it up at the ripe age of eighteen. Against her coach’s advice, Willy goes on to marry Eric and there starts a rivalry between the couple which is not all that healthy. This is the story of Willy who has to come to terms with her partner beating her at tennis and to continue loving his arch rival.While We need to talk about Kevin, with its dose of uncommon words, was like reading an Oxford dictionary, the author saves us from that trouble in Double Fault. Was that intentional? The book flows smoothly, the language is straight. There is a distinct change in the writing style in these two books.Shriver handles the story well. As the couple go through their courtship, wedding and its tensions, the reader feels the joy and pain. Though the story is in third person, it could as well be written in first person from Willy’s point of view. This is the same trick the author played in Kevin. The reader never got to see the ‘real’ world, everything was through Eva’s looking glass. Even in this book, we don’t really know the neutral version of incidents. Since everything is through Willy’s eyes, the reader never gets to know the ‘real’ Eric.Just like in Kevin, Shriver tries to find an answer for yet another common phenomenon - rivalry among spouses. And just like how Shriver did not conclude Kevin with a definitive answer, the beauty of Double Fault is that it ends without any concluding answer. The book need not have been about tennis at all - it could as well have been about a couple who fought over who was better at handling kids and it would have been equally interesting.The book is not about who was wrong - Willy or Eric. It is about a marriage which started turning sour. It is this generalization that makes the book interesting. Shriver does not waste words in justifying anyone’s actions or blaming anybody, she just narrates the story and the reader is left to read his own version of it. At the end of it, this is not just about marriage - this could well be applied to any relationship that exists.Shriver understands life and humans and their nature to such an extent that she could probably be the happiest person living. With her novel, Shriver drives home one point - if a relationship turns sour, it’s not just one person’s fault - it’s Double Fault. The book couldn’t have had a better title.
    • 3/5
      The story of the of the failing relationship of two tennis player - yes, the title really is a bad pun. The book is OK, but pretty flawed. The characters are one dimensional, and the story is barely believable (in a 'When Saturday Comes' - the Sean Bean 'classic' type way.) Put simply, the characters, in their mid-20's, are just too old to by rising or aspiring tennis stars.That said, I was still strangely engrossed, but really just to follow Eric's career as he improbably rose through the rankings. Willy (female) was just too simplistic a character to care about.If you find it for a pound, like I did, in the wonderful Hay-on-Wye Bookends, its probably worth an hour or so if you want a light read, but don't bother to seek it out.
    • 1/5
      Very disappointing, specially as I read it after "We need to talk about Kevin". I can only imagine that Shriver wrote this book when she was two. The dialogue is so stilted, it made me blush.She can be a great writer, as she has proven with "We need to talk about Kevin", so even in this bad book, she often has interesting insights into the politics of relationships but you would find it difficult to wait around for them if you weren't already sympathetic to her as a writer, or perhaps to tennis as a game.The book is so lightweight, that I found myself grasping at thematic straws like how the two central characters in Double Fault are like the younger selves of the two main characters in KevinHardly an urgent reason to rush out and devour this book.I could go on but what's the point? I would just waste your time, like this book. Don't read it.