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    This is the Life
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    This is the Life
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    This is the Life
    Ebook264 pages5 hours

    This is the Life

    By Joseph O’Neill

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    The debut novel from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.

    James Jones is slipping steadily through life. He has a steady job as a junior partner at a solicitor's firm, a steady girlfriend and a steady mortgage. Nothing much is happening in Jones's life but he really doesn't mind – this is exactly the way he likes it.

    Michael Donovan, meanwhile, is a star – a world-class international lawyer and advocate – he's everything Jones wanted to be and isn't. Jones was once Donovan's pupil and, for a while, it looked like he too would make his name – but he left that high-powered world behind a long time ago, or so he thought.

    One day Jones reads in the paper that Donovan has collapsed in court – then, out of the blue, Donovan contacts him; he has a job he needs Jones to work on…

    Joseph O'Neill's debut is wonderfully clever and comic novel – about ambitions and aspirations and the realities that they inevitably collide with.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateNov 1, 2012
    ISBN9780007383726
    Unavailable
    This is the Life
    Author

    Joseph O’Neill

    Joseph O’Neill lives in New York and teaches at Bard College. He is the author of four novels, Netherland (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008),The Dog, This Is the Life and The Breezes, as well as a memoir, Blood-Dark Track. His short stories have been published in the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his literary criticism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Irish Times, the Atlantic, Granta and other publications.

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    • 2/5
      Stopped reading half way through after skimming to the end and deciding nothing more was going to be revealed. Plus a dull main character wasn't encouraging.
    • 4/5
      The blurb on the back cover doesn't really do this book justice. Having said that, my husband asked me what it was about and my own description at the time seemed rather unprepossessing too. You just have to read it - the skill is in the writing, the constant humour, and the voice of the narrator who starts off as an average bloke, a bit socially inept, but becomes ever so slightly creepy as the book goes on. It reminded me a lot of Zoe Heller's excellent 'Notes on a Scandal'.It's hilarious in a cringemaking way - the narrator lurches from one social embarrassment to another, including a particularly toe-curling lavatorial incident. An intriguing mystery is set up, too, and I would have given the book five stars had this been tied up in a more efficient manner. It's one of those books where an awful lot is left to the reader to interpret. I think I understood it, but I guess I will never know for sure whether my interpretation was right.