A Play for the End of the World
Read by
Brittany Pressley,
Robert Petkoff
Release:
09/07/2021
Runtime:
9h 59m
Unabridged
Quantity:
“One of the few survivors of a generation, a Polish immigrant in New York…can’t forget the makeshift family that was transported to Treblinka without him…We come to understand Jaryk’s guilt-stricken ‘need to burrow into oblivion’—and to hope that another need will somehow uproot it.”
New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award's Goldberg Prize
An Oprah Daily Pick of Best Fall Books
A Vol.1 Brooklyn Pick of the Month
Among longlisted titles for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2022
A dazzling novel—set in early 1970's New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.
“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
Release:
2021-09-07
Runtime:
9h 59m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780593454022
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Praise