- Published: 15 February 2018
- ISBN: 9780241983423
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 352
Birds of America
Introduction by Booker Prize-Winning Author Penelope Lively
- Published: 15 February 2018
- ISBN: 9780241983423
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 352
A brilliant novel: honest, engaging and sharp as a tack
Sarah Waters on 'The Group'
A profoundly thoughtful and moving book
Life
A writer known for her immaculate prose, her wit, her glamour, her sexual adventures... and the shocking candor of her fiction
New Yorker
An absorbing novel about a young man's voyage into adulthood, enlivened by Mary McCarthy's needling wit. You have to go away to understand home, you have to lose yourself to find yourself; Mary McCarthy's insight into her young hero - his awkward growing-up, his efforts to understand his time and place - create an authentic and thoughtful slice of cultural history.
Hilary Mantel, Booker prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies'
Fiercely intelligent, insatiably combative, McCarthy's novels invite controversy
Penelope Lively, from the introduction
I read it in one gulp
Laura Freeman, author of 'The Reading Cure'
McCarthy earned recognition for her cool, analytic intelligence and her exacting literary voice - a voice capable of moving from the frivolously feminine to the willfully cerebral, from girlish insouciance to bare-knuckled fury
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
This funny, grumpy, coming-of-age tale still strikes a chord. . . There is much in McCarthy's novel, published by Penguin in a new edition to mark the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, that makes you say: "Yes! Exactly! Spot on."
The Times
Birds of America brings to mind the teenage angst of Catcher in the Rye, but with a political conscience. Full of hilarious and extremely honest one-liners
Essential Journal
An endlessly fascinating novel
San Francisco Chronicle
In the same class as Henry James's The American and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
Esquire
One of America's leading women of letters, a writer with a reputation for acerbic insights and penetrating prose
Guardian
There was never anything "ladylike" about Mary McCarthy's writing. For aspiring female writers, she remains totemic.
Vanity Fair
There was something so crisp and clever and bold about her writing
Claire Tomalin