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  • Published: 19 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241966372
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Here I Am




A monumental new novel from the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

God asked Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, and Abraham replied obediently, 'Here I am'.

This is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. Over the course of three weeks in present-day Washington DC, three sons watch their parents' marriage falter and their family home fall apart. Meanwhile, a larger catastrophe is engulfing another part of the world: a massive earthquake devastates the Middle East, sparking a pan-Arab invasion of Israel. With global upheaval in the background and domestic collapse in the foreground, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us - what is the true meaning of home? Can one man ever reconcile the conflicting duties of his many roles - husband, father, son? And how much of life can a person bear?

  • Published: 19 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241966372
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977. He is the editor of the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Everything Is Illuminated, his first novel, won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award in 2002.

Also by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Praise for Here I Am

A brilliantly acrobatic imagination

Sunday Times

A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives.

Evening Standard

An ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Foer's best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all. Has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well-reviewed books of midlist fiction put together.

New York Times

Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry. The book that The Corrections ought to have been.

Scotland on Sunday

Brilliant, masterly, always original.

New York Times Book Review

Foer writes like a dream. . . big-hearted, courageous and jaw-droppingly clever

Deborah Moggach

Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family.

TIME

Provocative . . . very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script.

Sunday Times

Publisher's description. The New York Times bestselling new novel from the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Wildly exhilarating and profoundly moving, this is the story of a man in crisis, a family imploding, a planet on the brink of disaster. Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now.

Penguin

Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking.

New Statesman

Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown . . . and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read.

The Times

Unarguably Foer's most substantial and impressive work yet.

Herald