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  • Published: 5 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241972953
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.00

A Calling for Charlie Barnes




From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a poignant novel about fathers, sons and the embers of the American dream

Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie.

A striver, romantic, and thoroughgoing capitalist, he's blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news. Rethinking his entire life, he starts to wonder: what makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?

  • Published: 5 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241972953
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.00

About the author

Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He attended the University of Iowa and the University of California, Irvine. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Also by Joshua Ferris

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Praise for A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be

Guardian, on 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'

Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate

Observer, on 'Then We Came to the End'

Very funny, intense and exhilarating

The Times, on 'Then We Came to the End'

Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write.

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire

Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there

New York Times Book Review on To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel... Then We Came to the End feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times on Then We Came to the End

A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant . . . A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities

Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest

Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

A deeply funny, very moving book . . . Ferris's hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages

Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

Brilliant, funny, heartbreaking . . . Family, memory, ambition and death, all told with dervishing glee. Not just a daredevil of a novel, but something truly new

Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

Ferris's work cuts to the heart of who we are by focusing very painfully on who one man was . . . Consider this book not just a work of grief or love or memoir, then, but a work of hope, too.

Publishers Weekly

This is the story of one disappointed idealist told by another, of one unreliable narrator described by another, and it is animated by filial love . . . funny, moving - and surprising

Guardian

This novel is funny - Ferris has lovely comic timing and a great way with the sheer silliness of a family's mental and physical bric-a-brac - and very moving

Guardian

Simultaneously narratively courageous and utterly hilarious . . . where it leaves the reader feels special and unique

Sunday Times

Ferris is on his finest deadpan form here, skewering contemporary America and the shallow values it embodied in the heat of the 2008 financial crash

Spectator

In Ferris's admirably risk-taking hands, this novel becomes so much more than simply another story of failed American dreams. Ferris has made himself into the leading writer of the American workplace . . . He understands both its absurdities (and this is another very funny book) and its rewards, but most of all he understands how it shapes modern America

Observer

Ferris could write enthralling realist fiction in his sleep but it's the ideas and formal ingenuity that really set this novel apart . . . [he considers] the role of storytelling in families, the myths we create and the possibility that there is no such thing as telling it straight

i

Dazzling . . . A more tender novel than Ferris's others, but that doesn't keep it from being murderously funny . . . [he has found] precisely the right way to meld memoir with satire, to do this with bracing originality and to keep heads spinning from this novel's first page to its last . . . he's risen to the top of his game

New York Times

A passionate, well-constructed, often hilarious and, at times, profound plunge into grief, both civic and intimate, as well as a culmination (so far) of the literary explorations he has been undertaking since he arrived

Sam Lipsyte, New York Times Book Review

He has proved that he's one of the best American authors of comic fiction working today. His humour is on full display but so are his intelligence and compassion. It's a masterpiece that shines a revealing light on both family and fiction itself

NPR

A warmly bullish but measured and reflectful voice that brings out all the humour and wisdom of the novel

The Times, Audiobook of the Week

A relentlessly self-reflective book

FT

Intriguing and intelligent . . . the humour throughout is exquisitely judged . . . and the descent into metafiction, the novel's true crowning glory, is extremely well done without ever feeling hammy or clunky

Irish Times

A touching tale about the love between fathers and sons

The Times

Inventive and witty, tender and wise. It's a portrait of life, love and death, and much else besides

Daily Mail

Until I read A Calling For Charlie Barnes, Joshua Ferris's virtuosic third novel, I couldn't recall the last time a book caused me to both laugh and gasp aloud. Madly funny and bristling with intelligence, this is the story of a man in later life wallowing in the detritus of the American Dream and of the children witnessing his decline

Megan Nolan, New Statesman, Books of the Year

A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have

Sathnam Sanghera, Guardian, Best Books of 2021

Splendid . . . it is hard to be genuinely funny in a novel but the final 50 or so pages, in which Charlie's family confront Jake Barnes, the fourth wall-breaking narrator of the novel, over the content of the tell-all memoir, was easily the most hilarious chapter of a novel I read all year

Martin Chilton, Independent, 20 Best Books of 2021

This is a fine American novel about family, love, and a decent but flawed man trying to be better. In dark times like these, I can't recommend this book too highly

Stephen King