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Slaughterhouse 5
  • Published: 16 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879693
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $40.00

Slaughterhouse 5

Formats & editions
Paperback
7 Jan 2025
Paperback
7 June 1991
Hardback
16 July 2024
EBook
7 May 2020
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VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

A beautiful hardback edition of one of the most funny, moving and brilliant novels of the twentieth century.

'A book to read and reread. He is a true artist' New York Times

Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time.

Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War.

But when, exactly?
How did he get here?
And how does he get out?

Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself.
This is a book about war.
Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.

'The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves' George Saunders

'A rare accomplishment... it is a graceful, ferociously humorous, sarcastic and ultimately compassionate parable about man's power for evil and his capacity for grace' Sunday Times

Vintage Quarterbound Classics: Bound to be beautiful
  • Published: 16 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879693
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Kurt Vonnegut

Born in 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, KURT VONNEGUT was one of the few grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by the New York Times “the counterculture’s novelist,” his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the U.S. in second half of the 20th century. After a stints as a soldier, anthropology PhD candidate, technical writer for General Electric, and salesman at a Saab dealership, Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication ofCat’s Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including Slaughterhouse-Five, soon followed. Never quite embraced by the stodgier arbiters of literary taste, Vonnegut was nonetheless beloved by millions of readers throughout the world. “Given who and what I am,” he once said, “it has been presumptuous of me to write so well.” Kurt Vonnegut died in New York in 2007.
portrait photo of Kurt Vonnegut

Also by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle: Popular Penguins
Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
Fates Worse Than Death
Slaughterhouse-Five Deluxe Edition
Monkey Business
Slaughterhouse-Five
See all

Praise for Slaughterhouse 5

Marvellous...the writing is pungent, the antics uproarious, the humour suitably black, the wit sharp as a hypodermic

Daily Telegraph

Mr Vonnegut knows a great deal about what is probably the largest massacre in modern history - the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. Slaughterhouse Five is a reaction to the event by one of our most gifted and incisive novelists. A work of keen literary artistry

Joseph Heller, author of 'Catch-22'

The individuality of Vonnegut's style is a curious yet perfect match for the pain of the emotional content. A humane, human book that always remains a work of art rather than biography, no matter how apparent the author's presence

Kate Atkinson

Unique...one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best

Doris Lessing

Devastating and supremely human

Guardian

Agonising, funny. His eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie seen back to front into a vision which, in its weird way, is as effecting as any short passage ever written against war

Time magazine

Very tough and very funny...sad and delightful...very Vonnegut

New York Times

A most courageous account of the human condition; at the same time a satire so funny it makes one laugh aloud

Evening Standard

Funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind

Los Angeles Times

Splendid... A Funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears

Life

There are writers who create a lot of readers, and there are writers who create a lot of writers, and Vonnegut was both

Jonathan Safran Foer

Extraordinary… A remarkably nice and clever book… Billy is clearly something of a stand-in for his creator, a means of talking to the point about the horror in Dresden, a hushed-up massacre worse than Hiroshima. The author intervenes frequently enough throughout his tale to establish that: his private pain keeps thumbing up from the page

Observer

A rare accomplishment... it is a graceful, ferociously humorous, sarcastic and ultimately compassionate parable about man's power for evil and his capacity for grace

Sunday Times