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  • Published: 2 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780141186092
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $45.00

The Pastures of Heaven




Each of these delightful interconnected tales is devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects that one particular family has on them all. Steinbeck tackles two important literary traditions here; American naturalism, with its focus on the conflict between natural instincts and the demand to conform to society's norms, and the short story cycle. Set in the heart of 'Steinbeck land', the lush Californian valleys.

  • Published: 2 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780141186092
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $45.00

About the author

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-68) is remembered as one of the greatest and best-loved American writers of the twentieth century. During the 1930s, his works included The Red Pony, Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, and Of Mice and Men. The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Praise for The Pastures of Heaven

Overwhelming - just buy it for its beauty

New Statesman

A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before...the message is universal

The Times

It is a rich, provocative and hopeful vision of the world, stuffed full of drama and surprise-its literary lineage - the ease with which spirits move through every day life - is from ancient Greece and medieval romances

Independent

Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose... When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them

Linda Grant, Independent on Sunday

This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word

Time Out

The Famished Road is a masterpiece if one ever existed

Jay Parini, Boston Sunday Globe

Azaro says that his is "a spiritchild nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth comes blood and betrayal". There's a glory in that. Azaro's scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious in its own right, too

Angela Carter, Sunday Times

In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child

Michael Palin