'To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate'

The Corrections (4th Estate Matchbook Classics) Paperback

The Corrections (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

Jonathan Franzen

A brilliantly perceptive and moving novel, that announced Jonathan Franzen as one of our greatest living writers.

One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up our Matchbook Classics’ series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.

After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband Alfred is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred’s condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas.

Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, The Corrections established Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.

Reviews of The Corrections (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

    • ‘A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question: what is life for? And that is as much as anyone could ask’ Guardian
    • ‘Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture’ Don DeLillo
    • ‘Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner’ Zadie Smith
    • ‘Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth.’ Evening Standard
    • ‘A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch’ Financial Times

More from Jonathan Franzen