Synopsis
Two very different boys are drawn together by their oppressive home lives
and by a connection that is both brotherly and sexual in this superb audio
adaptation of Cunningham's vivid coming-of-age tale. Clevelanders Bobby
Morrow and Jonathan Glover become childhood friends in the 1960s, and
their friendship persists well into the '80s, when first Jonathan and
then Bobby moves to New York City. There they meet aging hippie Clare,
who imposes her own needs upon the two men. Clare, read with unflappable
clarity by Van Dyck, attempts to build a normal life for herself using
Bobby to become pregnant and Jonathan as emotional support. But as Jonathan's
perceptive mother, Alice, warns her son, the unusual family they're creating
won't last.
Actors Farrell and Roberts-who play Bobby and Jonathan respectively in
the Warner Brothers motion picture-fill the same roles here, and both
deliver moving, understated performances. Although some listeners will
wish they could soak up this absorbing story all in one sitting, the narrators'
well-paced readings force the listener to sit back and appreciate the
intricacy and skill of Cunningham's exquisite prose. (From Publishers
Weekly)
Biography
Michael
Cunningham lives in New York City. His novel A Home at the End of the
World was published to acclaim in 1990; an excerpt, entitled "White Angel"
and published in The New Yorker, was chosen for Best American Short Stories
1989.
His novel Flesh and Blood was published in 1995, and that year he won
a Whiting Writer's Award. The Hours, Cunningham's third novel, received
the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Contributors Testimonials
Jonathan
loves Bobby but Bobby loves Clare and Clare loves Jonathan. Outline the
plot of Michael Cunningham's' A Home At The End of The World and it sounds
like a listless daytime soap but Cunningham’s writing is distinguished
by grace notes rather than melodrama. He brilliantly evokes the eddying
emotions and secret desires of the trio as decades roll by. By the end
you don’t really care who ends up with who but whether - as Cunningham
suggests - there is another way of organising our relationships outside
the strictures of gender and sexuality. The message isn’t laid on
thickly though, and Home provides a good introduction to the themes of
the Cunningham ouevre, which includes Flesh and Blood, The Hours and his
most recent novel, Specimen Days, in which the Pulitzer-winning author
turns his focus, intreguingly, to science fiction.