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The Married Man
  • Published: 6 April 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099285144
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

The Married Man



A searingly honest love story told in White’s characteristically beautiful, heart-breaking prose.

‘Poignant and challenging...A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound’ Daily Telegraph

Austin Smith, a middle aged American, works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance.

As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, they deal with comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara where their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

  • Published: 6 April 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099285144
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Edmund White

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His non-fiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the winner of the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and is the recipient of the 2019 National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His most recent novels are A Saint from Texas (2020) and A Previous Life (2021).

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Praise for The Married Man

Written with the characteristic brilliance and the particular flair for poetic detail that so distinguishes his books, Edmund White's new novel is arguably his best to date... Heartbreakingly beautiful prose, so elegantly achieved it has the ring of a master...marvellously life-affirming... In short, nothing less than brilliant

The Times

A superb novel

Evening Standard

Undoubtedly one of his best novels. The prose is lyrical...writing that is truly supple, adapting itself to comedy or tragedy as required

Sunday Times

The Married Man is Edmund White at his quintessential best

Sunday Telegraph

Poignant and challenging... Candid and often painfully personal... A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound

Daily Telegraph