Sophie's Choice
  • Published: 2 February 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099470441
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $40.00
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Sophie's Choice

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The movie was Oscar-nominated and the book was banned in libraries across the States. This heartbreaking, compassionate and controversial novel interweaves themes of survivor guilt, madness and betrayal.

In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.
  • Published: 2 February 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099470441
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

William Styron

Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut.

He is the author of The Long March, Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire and Sophie's Choice. He has also published Darkness Visible, the remarkable story of his descent into depression, the collection This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, and A Tidewater Morning. William Styron died in 2006.

Also by William Styron

Darkness Visible
Depression
My Generation
This Quiet Dust
Selected Letters of William Styron
The Long March
The Suicide Run
See all

Praise for Sophie's Choice

A compassionate, brilliantly written novel

The Times

William Styron's Sophie's Choice is a landmark of mid-20th-century American fiction - an impressively fat novel that most literate Americans claim to have read even if they haven't

Sunday Telegraph

A masterpiece, [which leaves] more conventional treatments of the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List, looking obtuse and sentimental

The Times

A weighty, passionate novel . . . courageous [and] masterly

NY Times

Styron is a writer's writer, capable of setting a pastoral idyll in Brooklyn, and the traumas narrated occur alongside a classic American coming-of-age story

Xan Brooks, Guardian, 1000 novels everyone must read

Read it if you can bear.

Katy Guest, The Independent

If you’re not sobbing at the end of this tale of tortured souls, consult a doctor immediately because you might be dead

David Baldacci, Mail on Sunday