> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554141
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

How Far Can You Go?



A novel of satiric insight and comic despair dealing with the lives and loves of ten young Catholics in the 1960s and 70s.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there's Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?

  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554141
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

David Lodge

David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Also by David Lodge

See all

Praise for How Far Can You Go?

Hilarious...a magnificent book

Graham Greene

Huge, bitterly funny and superbly presented montage of the false nostrums that assailed Christianity like worms

Sunday Times

Funny, sad, knowledgeable

Irish Times

Brilliant and intricate black comedy

Time Out