The Innocents

Contributors

By Francesca Segal

Formats and Prices

Price

$21.99

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $21.99
  2. ebook $9.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 14, 2013. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

“It is impossible to resist this novel’s wit, grace, and charm.” –Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia

A smart and slyly funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment; a triumphant and beautifully executed recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London. He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry. To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community–a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam’s role in a warm, inclusive family he loves.

But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel’s younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he’d care to admit. Ellie–beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent–offers a liberation that he hadn’t known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home?

Genre:

  • "An emotionally and intellectually astute debut."
    Kirkus
  • "[A] delightful first novel... wise, witty and observant."
    The London Times
  • "Segal writes with an understated elegance."
    The Observer (UK)

On Sale
May 14, 2013
Page Count
304 pages
Publisher
Hachette Books
ISBN-13
9781401341893

Francesca Segal

About the Author

Francesca Segal was born in London in 1980. The daughter of a writer and an editor, she studied at Oxford and Harvard University before becoming a journalist and critic. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, FT Magazine, and The JC, amongst others. For three years she wrote the Debut Fiction Column in The Observer and has been a features writer at Tatler. She divides her time between London and New York.

Learn more about this author