Sophie's Choice

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 Sophies past: her memories of pre-war Poland the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice. Review A masterpiece [which leaves] more conventional treatments of the Holocaust such asSchindlers List looking obtuse and sentimental ―The TimesWilliam StyronsSophies 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 havent ―Sunday TelegraphA compassionate brilliantly written novel ―The TimesA weighty passionate novel . . . courageous [and] masterly ―NY TimesStyron is a writers 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 About the Author 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 Sophies 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.