What I Loved: An 'addictive masterpiece' - The Times

Siri Hustvedt

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This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children Leo s son drowns when he s 12, while Bill s son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.

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Praise for What I Loved: An 'addictive masterpiece' - The Times

  • Breathtaking - James Urquhart, IndependentA love story with the grip and suspense of a thriller. It makes you ponder human existence with a peculiar mixture of stoicism and wonder. - Noonie Minogue, Times Literary SupplementDefiantly complex and frequently dazzling ... she has created a conceptually exciting work that demands we think, but which still allows us room to feel. - Alex Clark, Sunday TimesSubstantial, moving and beautifully written - Christian House, Independent on SundayA big, wide, sensuous novel - clever, sinister, yet attractively real - Julie Myerson, GuardianA consummately intelligent novel, highly literate but also intensely moving. - Jackie McGlone, ScotsmanRiveting ... erudite and immensely detailed ... a rich, densely textured and utterly absorbing novel - Lesley GlaisterSubtle, compassionate, wise, and supremely intelligent, it's a striking achievement. - Kieron Corless, Time Out

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Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller What I Loved, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros, Living, Thinking, Looking and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection, Reading To You, and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.

Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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