New Releases by Andrew Sean Greer

From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greer''s extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli, told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards. A Today Show Book Club Pick We are each the love of someone''s life. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max''s father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man''s body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max''s life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer''s The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

"Three exceptional women are at the center of the group: the quietly brilliant Denise, destined for professional greatness and personal calamity; Kathy, distant and shrewd but longing for connection; and young and careless Lydia, attempting to escape the scientists'' long-casting shadows. All three women make choices early in their lives that echo and return - like the comet above them - over a quarter century."--BOOK JACKET.

"In 1965, on a small island in the South Pacific, a group of astronomers gather to witness the passing of a comet, but when a young boy dies during a meteor shower, the lives of the scientists and their loved ones change in subtle yet profound ways"--Jacket.