book review lucky jim

Kingsley Amis , David Lodge  ( Introduction )

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Kingsley Amis

Ratings & reviews.

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

'Are you in love with him?' 'I don't much care for that word,' she said, as if rebuking a foul-mouthed tradesman. 'Why not?' 'Because I don't know what it means.' He gave a quiet yell. 'Oh, don't say that; no, don't say that. It's a word you must often have come across in conversation and literature. Are you going to tell me it sends you flying to the dictionary every time? Of course you're not. I suppose you mean it's purely personal --- sorry, got to get the jargon right --- purely subjective.' 'Well it is, isn't it?' 'Yes, that's right. You talk as though it's the only thing that is. If you can tell me whether you like greengages or not, you can tell me whether you love Bertrand or not, if you want to tell me, that is.' 'You're still making it much too simple. All I can really say is that I'm pretty sure I was in love with Bertrand a little while ago, and now I'm rather less sure. That up-and-down business doesn't happen with greengages; that's the difference.' 'Not with greengages, agreed. But what about rhubarb, eh? What about rhubarb? Ever since my mother stopped forcing me to eat it, rhubarb and I have been conducting a relationship that can swing between love and hatred every time we meet.' 'That's all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is that it gets you in such a state you can't look at your own feelings dispassionately.' 'That would be a good thing if you could do it, then?' 'Why, of course.' He gave another quiet yell, this time some distance above middle C. 'You've got a long way to go, if you don't mind me saying so, even though you are nice. By all means view your own feelings dispassionately, if you feel you ought to, but that's nothing to do with deciding whether (Christ) you're in love. Deciding that's no different from the greengages business. What is difficult, and this time you really do need this dispassionate rubbish, is deciding what to do about being in love if you are, whether you can stick the person you love enough to marry them, and so on.' 'Why, that's exactly what I've been saying, in different words.' 'Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure's different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realise that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don't ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?'

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

H as there even been a writer so choked with bile as Kingsley Amis ? None of his novels look particularly kindly upon his fellow man, but Lucky Jim , his first, is driven by a particularly epic disdain for the idiocies, pedantries, mindless rules and unpleasant personal habits with which humanity is cursed. The titular Jim Dixon is an academic of a pretty poor sort, a medievalist who only picked the period because it looked like a soft option. Having clawed his way into a second-rate university he manages to cram the occasional desultory lecture around the more urgent business of persuading pretty girls to take his classes. Despite this non-specific lust, he does have a girlfriend of sorts: the grotesque Margaret, whose "tinkle of tiny silver bells" laugh will freeze the heart of any would-be coquette.

Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language. One of the more brilliant concerns a weekend at the home of a ghastly senior professor. After an afternoon of enforced madrigals, Jim becomes so horribly drunk that he inadvertently destroys his host's spare room. His attempts to make good the damage while labouring under a painfully accurately described hangover is so wildly funny as to make the book unsuitable for consumption on public transport.

Jim is more appealing than some of Amis's later heroes; his hatreds – expressed viscerally through a vast repertoire of grotesque faces – are infectious, while his increasingly elaborate attempts to dig himself out of trouble rarely have the desired effect. The result is a novel in the grand tradition of English satire, in which irritants large and small – rude waiters, manipulative women, cliches, affectation and the price of beer – conspire to create a comic howl of hatred of ear-splitting volume and force.

• Classics corner
• Kingsley Amis

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Review: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

• ← Older Posts
• Newer Posts →

One of my favourite books. I've heard some people say it's outdated, and therefore not a really good book. But I agree with you, it still works. I have to reread it! :) Petra

Totally agree Petra. I think some of the book does age a little, but don't all books ages eventually? I really love the humour, it's a compact and tightly written novel that is great fun.

I always welcome comments...

Analysis: The Outsider by Albert Camus

Analysis: Money by Martin Amis

Search this blog.

Accessibility Links

Rereading: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis review — a trailblazing, laugh-out-loud novel

Lucky Jim was published in 1954. It was multiply trailblazing: an important writer’s first novel, the first Angry Young Man novel, Britain’s first campus novel. The story is as simple as the title. Jim Dixon, a second-rate history lecturer at a fourth-rate university (so called) gets himself in a continuous mess with women and his job. The laugh-out-loud rate is high to bellowing every other page.

I first read Lucky Jim in 1956 as a teenager. That same year the only university that troubled to interview me for an undergraduate place was Leicester. Kingsley Amis’s bosom pal Philip Larkin’s first job had been there as an assistant librarian in the late 1940s. Amis’s first reaction on drinking a cup of filthy coffee in Leicester’s senior

Related articles

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to 500)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2023
• Best Kids' Books of 2023
• Political Novels
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Book Reviews on...

By kingsley amis, recommendations from our site.

“This is Kingsley Amis’s best novel, and maybe the best novel ever written about university life. The main character, Jim Dixon, is one of the great scoundrels in literature, but you love him.” Read more...

Andy Borowitz recommends the best Comic Writing

Andy Borowitz , Comedians & Humorist

Other books by Kingsley Amis

Colonel sun by kingsley amis, our most recommended books, on liberty by john stuart mill, war and peace by leo tolstoy, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the odyssey by homer and translated by emily wilson, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding).

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

Kingsley Amis, David Lodge | 3.79 | 24,693 ratings and reviews

Ranked #21 in Academia

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Lucky Jim from the world's leading experts.

Andy Borowitz This is Kingsley Amis’s best novel, and maybe the best novel ever written about university life. (Source)

Similar Books

If you like Lucky Jim, check out these similar top-rated books:

Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?

Spend $75 or more for free US shipping

• Open media 1 in modal

by Kingsley Amis , introduction by Keith Gessen

Couldn't load pickup availability

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim  remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy. More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics ISBN: 9781590175750 Pages: 296 Publication Date: October 2, 2012

Lucky Jim illustrates a crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man. And Dixon, like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all. —Christopher Hitchens

Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation is so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned….They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public bar and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious….They are scum. —W. Somerset Maugham

’After Evelyn Waugh, what?’ this reviewer asked six years ago….The answer, already, is Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky Jim ….Satirical and sometimes farcical, they are derived from shrewd observation of contemporary British life, and they occasionally imply social morals…. Lucky Jim is extremely funny. Everyone was much amused, and since it is also a kind of male Cinderella or Ugly Duckling story, it left its readers goo-humored and glowing. —Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker , 1956

I was recommended [Kinglsey Amis’ Lucky Jim ] when I was a teenager trying to figure out how to start reading “serious” books. Great recommendation, because on the surface it’s nothing of the sort, but it is brilliant. —Hugh Dancy, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language. —Olivia Laing, The Observer

Remarkably, Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was in 1954. It is part of the landscape, and it defines academia in the eyes of much of the world as does no other book, yet if you are coming to it for the first time you will feel, as you glide happily through its pages, that you are traveling in a place where no one else has ever been. If you haven't yet done so, you must. —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Lucky Jim is an extremely interesting first novel, and parts of it are very funny indeed: the episodes of the bed-burning and Jim's public lecture, for instance, mount to the complexity and tension of certain passages in the Marx Brothers' films or in the paper-hanging act one still sees from time to time in pantomime. And Mr Amishas an unwaveringly merciless eye for the bogus: some aspects of provincial culture—the madrigals and recorders of Professor Welch, for instance—are pinned down as accurately as they have ever been; and he has, too, an eye for character—the female lecturer Margaret, who battens neurotically on Jim's pity, is quite horribly well done. Mr Amis is a novelist of formidable and uncomfortable talent. —Walter Allen, The New Statesmen , 1954

Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading., is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series let us know.

• Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
• Opens in a new window.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

by James Hart ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017

A finely written, painful, but profound book.

A former business executive tells the moving story of his rise from poverty to privilege and the secrets that haunted—and almost destroyed—his life.

Hart ( Milding , 2004) met future wife Carly Simon on a chance train ride to New York City. He had not known who Simon was, only that he was profoundly attracted to her. A former seminarian, the author was a divorced insurance salesman and sober alcoholic with a mentally challenged son. His early life had been marred by the alcoholism and violence of a father whose “rages were as unpredictable as the Atlantic,” and Catholicism had been his refuge. Simon, by contrast, lived a glamorous life as a famous recording artist who had been married to singer James Taylor and romanced by countless other stars, as well as the daughter of Simon & Schuster co-founder Richard Simon. Despite their differences and the fact that the author, who bore a striking resemblance to Taylor, sometimes felt like a replacement for him, they married six months after they met. For Hart, the main challenge was acclimating to privilege and his sudden acquisition of the financial and emotional support he needed to pursue his dream of writing a novel. He soon discovered that his underlying attraction to men was also an issue, but one he could not face. Painful fissures appeared in his marriage to Simon and in his life; prescription painkillers, hookups with gay men, and crack cocaine became his modes of escape. Two decades after it began, his marriage ended, and he was forced to confront three painful truths: that he was an addict and homosexual who had failed the son he could not bring himself to love. In this searching, honest, and emotionally nuanced narrative, Hart navigates the struggle with his personal demons and the celebrity world with which he unexpectedly became enmeshed with elegance, grit, and artistry. The result is memoir that makes for exceptionally poignant, lyrical reading.

Pub Date: April 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-62778-214-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Cleis

Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

More by Tim Harris

BOOK REVIEW

by Tim Harris ; illustrated by James Hart

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Google Rating

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Literature & Fiction
• United States

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -10% $13.45 $ 13 . 45 FREE delivery Saturday, May 18 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Figureheads Toys LLC

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Save with Used - Good .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $8.61 $ 8 . 61 FREE delivery Monday, May 20 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Martistore

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the authors

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Lucky Jim Paperback – June 22, 1992

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 251 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Classics
• Publication date June 22, 1992
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
• ISBN-10 9780140186307
• ISBN-13 978-0140186307
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

In Lucky Jim , Amis introduces us to Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a British college who spends his days fending off the legions of malevolent twits that populate the school. His job is in constant danger, often for good reason. Lucky Jim hits the heights whenever Dixon tries to keep a preposterous situation from spinning out of control, which is every three pages or so. The final example of this--a lecture spewed by a hideously pickled Dixon--is a chapter's worth of comic nirvana. The book is not politically correct (Amis wasn't either), but take it for what it is, and you won't be disappointed.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0140186301
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; Revised edition (June 22, 1992)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 251 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780140186307
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140186307
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
• #1,897 in Classic American Literature
• #21,798 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #43,989 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the authors

Kingsley amis.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Plot Summary? We’re just getting started.

Add this title to our requested Study Guides list!

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1954

Plot Summary

Continue your reading experience.

SuperSummary Plot Summaries provide a quick, full synopsis of a text. But SuperSummary Study Guides — available only to subscribers — provide so much more!

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry.

See for yourself. Check out our sample guides:

Toni Morrison

Malcolm Gladwell

David And Goliath

D. H. Lawrence

Whales Weep Not!

A SuperSummary Plot Summary provides a quick, full synopsis of a text.

A SuperSummary Study Guide — a modern alternative to Sparknotes & CliffsNotes — provides so much more, including chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and important quotes.

See the difference for yourself. Check out this sample Study Guide:

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Bookreader Item Preview

Share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

obscured text inherent from the source

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

753 Previews

23 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station21.cebu on June 13, 2020

A Gripping Family Saga Asks, What Makes for ‘Real Americans’?

Rachel Khong’s new novel follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way.

Credit... Chau Luong

Supported by

• Share full article

By Wilson Wong

Wilson Wong is an editing resident at the Book Review.

• April 30, 2024
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

REAL AMERICANS, by Rachel Khong

As the story goes, after the death of China’s first emperor in 210 B.C., Chen Sheng, a military captain, organized a motley band of soldiers in a revolt against the Qin dynasty and its harsh penal laws. Sheng was defeated, but he became known for his belief that one’s status is not intrinsic — that one can change, grow, transcend. “Are kings, generals and ministers merely born into their kind?” he asked, a rhetorical question that became a rallying cry about identity and self-determination.

That is the same kind of query that propels Rachel Khong’s new novel, “Real Americans,” which begins with a scene involving an enchanted lotus seed supposedly “carried to the first emperor of united China in the mouth of a dragon.” Part historical fiction and part family saga, the book homes in on this inquiry: Can we change who we fundamentally are, or who we were meant to be? Or, are we inevitable? What do we make, then, of those who come after us?

“Real Americans,” which comes after Khong’s 2017 debut, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” is a sprawling novel, divided into three sections, each told from a different generation of a Chinese American family. It opens in New York in 1999, with Lily, a poor, unpaid media intern, falling in love with Matthew, a “distractingly hot” WASP-y aristocrat (read: blue-eyed, blond, white and rich). After a complicated courtship that is buoyed by passion but unsettled by their class differences, they get married and have a son; then Lily learns that her family and Matthew’s family are secretly more intertwined than she thought.

Before we see how this discovery plays out, we jump to 2021. Matthew and Lily’s child, Nick, is now a teenager, plagued by the usual jitters that accompany adolescence: puberty, first love, college applications. He and Lily now live in Washington, but curiously absent from their life is Matthew, whom Nick does not know. An auspicious match on a DNA test brings him to clandestine encounters with his father, meetings that threaten to unravel Nick’s world because they prompt him to question what role, if any, Matthew should play in his life and force him to reckon with his mother’s shrouded past.

Then the story leaps forward again, now to 2030 from the perspective of Lily’s mother and Nick’s grandmother, a geneticist named May. She recounts the turbulent conditions she endured under Mao Zedong’s China, the difficult circumstances she overcame to escape to and survive in the United States and how one scientific discovery caroms through her posterity.

The story is full of family secrets and discoveries that could easily veer into melodrama, but Khong is a deft writer who grounds even the most sweeping themes and scenes. Her eye is especially attuned to the fickle markers of race and the illusion of the American dream. “Real Americans” — which covers more than 80 years, and touches on everything from the Cultural Revolution to Sept. 11 to the fight against affirmative action — is as much about being Asian in America as it is about the working class, the politically disenfranchised and the universal quest to understand the self.

As the novel unfolds, the story drops delicious mysteries that guide the reader: Why and how did Lily and Matthew’s fairy-tale relationship come to an end? How is Nick, who is mixed race, somehow a clone of Matthew who bears no resemblance to his Chinese American mother, Lily? And how and why is May familiar, perhaps too familiar, with Matthew’s father, a pharmaceutical executive? Khong has a gift for building suspense, crafting a story so compulsively bingeable that the pages essentially turn themselves.

That tension, however, is sometimes lost for banal sentences (“This was an artist’s task, he explained, to observe”). And Khong hammers the novel’s theme of who or what constitutes an American so bluntly and so repetitively — “I was as American as they came”; “We may look Chinese, but we have no loyalty to China. We want to be American” — that the writing can feel didactic.

Still, the novel’s ambition is admirable, and it’s easy to get lost in the unspoken truths between Lily, Nick and May as they try to knit themselves into a coherent whole. It appears to matter less, Khong suggests, what our environment or nationality is than the people, both chosen and biological, that we elect to surround ourselves with. “Aren’t we lucky?” she writes. “Our DNA encodes innumerable people, and yet it’s you and I who are here.” Indeed how lucky we readers are to be acquainted with these Americans, imagined and alive.

REAL AMERICANS | By Rachel Khong | Knopf | 399 pp. | $29

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

TheSportster

'business is about to pick up' jim ross book review: good ol' jr is back with more great stories.

Jim Ross' latest book, "Business Is About to Pick Up', comes out from BenBella Books on May 7. TheSportster has a review for wrestling fans.

• JR's book delves into his most iconic wrestling moments, not just another memoir we've read before.
• Ross reminisces as a devoted fan, taking readers on a nostalgic journey through wrestling history.
• The book celebrates wrestling's evolution, acknowledging the past while looking towards the future.

Few people in the history of professional wrestling have more stories to tell than Jim Ross . Good ol' JR got his start in the sport half a century ago, in 1974, as a referee. He's worked for promotions like Mid-South Wrestling , WCW, WWE, and now, All Elite Wrestling. He's seen it all during those five decades, from wrestling's greatest days, to some of its most tragic. Ross has written a few books before, including 2017's Slobberknocker: My Life in Wrestling and 2020's Under the Black Hat: My Life in the WWE and Beyond (he's even written cookbooks!), but his latest, Business Is About to Pick Up!: 50 Years of Wrestling in 50 Unforgettable Calls stands out because Ross isn't writing a memoir we've read before. Instead, this book is filled with snapshots of how it felt to be part of some of wrestling's biggest moments, including a few you may have forgotten.

A review copy of this book was provided by BenBella Books.

Jim Ross Had A Memorable Wrestling Career Long Before He Joined WWE

Good ol' jr was the voice of wcw.

Jim Ross' opening dedication for Business Is About to Pick Up is, "To a lifetime of fans, from a lifelong fan." This is because the book is written for those fans, with Ross reminiscing as a fan himself. If you want a book going into great detail about Ross' life outside the ring and lots of backstage stories , this isn't it. He has written those books already. Business Is About to Pick Up is like a time machine, with Jim Ross wanting to take the reader back to those big moments. If you're not a wrestling fan, you might not appreciate it, but if you grew up with Jim Ross (and with his iconic career, we all have), then these stories, crafted so clearly, take us back to where we can nearly smell the arena and hear the roar of the crowd. Many chapters begin with Ross simply reminding us of what was going on that year in pop culture as a quick way to take us back. For many of those years, Jim Ross has been a big part of that pop culture himself.

Only two short chapters look at Ross' early days in the business, from his time on college radio to working with Tri-State Championship Wrestling. After that, Jim Ross really jumps into it, as his career took off as a commentator with Mid-South Wrestling and later WCW, where he worked with the same commentator he shares the desk with now in AEW, Tony Schiavone. The WWE Hall of Famer goes over his most famous calls of that era, such as when Ric Flair battled Ron Garvin at Starrcade 1987, or when he tried to find a way to sell the most bizarre Chamber of Horrors match at 1991's Halloween Havoc . That doesn't mean Jim Ross is simply living in nostalgia, as if this is The Chris Farley Show on SNL, with the host going, "Remember that time you called Ric Flair vs. Sting? That was awesome!" No, with honesty and humor, Ross takes us into his mindset during those moments, while also paying respect to them. He writes these early tales as if he was a fan in the front row shocked that he was so lucky to be there.

Why Jim Ross Left WCW In 1993, Explained

Business really picked up when jim ross signed with wwe, jim ross and jerry lawler are wrestling's most famous commentary team.

Much of Business Is About to Pick Up centers on Jim Ross' knowledge that he knew he needed to evolve with the times in wrestling. If he had stayed in an old school mentality as many in the business did when the 80s changed over to the 90s, he would have been left behind. Instead, Ross did whatever was asked of him, even if that meant dressing up in a toga for his WWE debut at WrestleMania 9 at Caesar's Palace . JR knew he was a long way from home in Oklahoma, but rather than be humiliated, he accepted it and grew, stating, "I knew I'd made it where I wanted to go." Now he just had to prove to everyone that he belonged

After that comes two decades of WWE stories. It was an up-and-down time for Jim Ross in WWE, with Bell's Palsy attacks, more than one firing by Vince McMahon, and public humiliation on TV from the boss . And while he does briefly touch on how those moments made him feel, again, this is not that book. This is not the story of Jim Ross, but a celebration of the sport he loves. Ross is in awe, like a kid, as he reminisces about a random Raw in 1994 where he called one of his favorite matches, Bret Hart vs. The 1-2-3 Kid. He gets equally sentimental about the time Barry Horowitz won a match in 1995, as he does when Dwayne Johnson made his debut the next year, or when The Undertaker took on Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 25 . The sweetest moment of his WWE recollections, however, is when Ross writes about his 2007 WWE Hall of Fame induction . Rather than going on about whether he deserved it and what he said, he instead talks about his wife, Jan, and how he was looking for her in the crowd. Even though Jan tragically passed away in 2017, there is beauty in the heartbreak, as Good Ol' JR writes about how lucky he was to find true love.

Why Jim Ross’ First Meeting With Vince McMahon Was So Special 

Jim ross' commentary career entered a new era with aew, the addition of jr immediately made aew feel legitimate.

Jim Ross writes about how wrestling saved him after Jan passed away, and you could argue that AEW helped save him as well when he got to raise his voice aloud about his love for wrestling when AEW came to existence in 2019. He doesn't use these pages to bash WWE and Vince McMahon, but to explore the appreciation he felt to be part of the action again. He writes reverently about the joy of watching matches with Kenny Omega or Darby Allin just as he did about Ricky Steamboat decades earlier.

One predominant theme in Business Is About to Pick Up is that Jim Ross wants to get it right when it comes to the evolution of wrestling. Times have changed, with wrestlers who weren't straight white men once being treated a certain way, but now we have female, Black, gay, and transgender wrestlers thriving without who they are being mocked or used to sell a character. Ross reminisces about the past as a way to look at the future. Now, at the age of 72, he doesn't finish the book talking about the end of a career, but rather how he wants it to keep going, because wrestling is his purpose. It's still who he is, and he doesn't know who he would be without it. We don't know what wrestling would be without him either.

Business Is About to Pick Up: 50 Years of Wrestling in 50 Unforgettable Calls Rating: 4.5/5

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

In two new books, the longtime essayist and culture warrior shows off his wry observations about himself and the world

Humorous, common-sensical, temperamentally conservative, Joseph Epstein may be the best familiar — that is casual, personal — essayist of the last half-century. Not, as he might point out, that there’s a lot of competition. Though occasionally a scourge of modern society’s errancies, Epstein sees himself as essentially a serious reader and “a hedonist of the intellect.” His writing is playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.

Now 87, Epstein has just published his autobiography, “ Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life ,” in tandem with “ Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays .” This pair of books brings the Epstein oeuvre up to around 30 volumes of sophisticated literary entertainment. While there are some short-story collections (“The Goldin Boys,” “Fabulous Small Jews”), all the other books focus on writers, observations on American life, and topics as various as ambition, envy, snobbery, friendship, charm and gossip. For the record, let me add that I own 14 volumes of Epstein’s views and reviews and would like to own them all.

Little wonder, then, that Epstein’s idea of a good time is an afternoon spent hunched over Herodotus’s “Histories,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian” or almost anything by Henry James, with an occasional break to enjoy the latest issue of one of the magazines he subscribes to. In his younger days, there were as many as 25, and most of them probably featured Epstein’s literary journalism at one time or another. In the case of Commentary, he has been contributing pieces for more than 60 years.

As Epstein tells it, no one would have predicted this sort of intellectual life for a kid from Chicago whose main interests while growing up were sports, hanging out, smoking Lucky Strikes and sex. A lackadaisical C student, Myron Joseph Epstein placed 169th in a high school graduating class of 213. Still, he did go on to college — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — because that’s what was expected of a son from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. But Urbana-Champaign wasn’t a good fit for a jokester and slacker: As he points out, the president of his college fraternity “had all the playfulness of a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.” No matter. Caught peddling stolen copies of an upcoming accounting exam for $5 a pop, Epstein was summarily expelled.

Fortunately, our lad had already applied for a transfer to the University of Chicago, to which he was admitted the next fall. Given his record, this shows a surprising laxity of standards by that distinguished institution, but for Epstein the move was life-changing. In short order, he underwent a spiritual conversion from good ol’ boy to European intellectual in the making. In the years to come, he would count the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils among his close friends, edit the American Scholar, and teach at Northwestern University. His students, he recalls, were “good at school, a skill without any necessary carry-over, like being good at pole-vaulting or playing the harmonica.”

Note the edge to that remark. While “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” is nostalgia-laden, there’s a hard nut at its center. Epstein feels utter contempt for our nation’s “radical change from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one.” As he explains: “Our parents’ culture and that which came long before them was about the formation of character; the therapeutic culture was about achieving happiness. The former was about courage and honor, the latter about self-esteem and freedom from stress.” This view of America’s current ethos may come across as curmudgeonly and reductionist, but many readers — whatever their political and cultural leanings — would agree with it. Still, such comments have sometimes made their author the focus of nearly histrionic vilification.

Throughout his autobiography, this lifelong Chicagoan seems able to remember the full names of everyone he’s ever met, which suggests Epstein started keeping a journal at an early age. He forthrightly despises several older writers rather similar to himself, calling Clifton Fadiman, author of “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” pretentious, then quite cruelly comparing Mortimer J. Adler, general editor of the “Great Books of the Western World” series, with Sir William Haley, one of those deft, widely read English journalists who make all Americans feel provincial. To Epstein, “no two men were more unalike; Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer vain, coarse, intellectually crude.” In effect, Fadiman and Adler are both presented as cultural snake-oil salesmen. Of course, both authors were popularizers and adept at marketing their work, but helping to enrich the intellectual lives of ordinary people doesn’t strike me as an ignoble purpose.

In his own work, Epstein regularly employs humor, bits of slang or wordplay, and brief anecdotes to keep his readers smiling. For instance, in a chapter about an editorial stint at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Epstein relates this story about a colleague named Martin Self:

“During those days, when anti-Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband, asked Martin if he were going to that afternoon’s protest march. ‘No, Naomi,’ he said, ‘afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.’”

Learned wit, no doubt, but everything — syntax, diction, the choice of the philosopher Santayana for reverence — is just perfect.

But Epstein can be earthier, too. Another colleague “was a skirt-chaser extraordinaire," a man "you would not feel safe leaving alone with your great-grandmother.” And of himself, he declares: “I don’t for a moment wish to give the impression that I live unrelievedly on the highbrow level of culture. I live there with a great deal of relief.”

In his many essays, including the sampling in “Familiarity Breeds Content,” Epstein is also markedly “quotacious,” often citing passages from his wide reading to add authority to an argument or simply to share his pleasure in a well-turned observation. Oddly enough, such borrowed finery is largely absent from “Never Say You’ve Had a Happy Life.” One partial exception might be the unpronounceable adjective “immitigable,” which appears all too often. It means unable to be mitigated or softened, and Epstein almost certainly stole it from his friend Shils, who was fond of the word.

Despite his autobiography’s jaunty title, Epstein has seen his share of trouble. As a young man working for an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, he married a waitress after she became pregnant with his child. When they separated a decade later, he found himself with four sons to care for — two from her previous marriage, two from theirs. Burt, the youngest, lost an eye in an accident while a toddler, couldn’t keep a job, fathered a child out of wedlock and eventually died of an opioid overdose at 28. Initially hesitant, Epstein came to adore Burt’s daughter, Annabelle, as did his second wife, Barbara, whom he married when they were both just past 40.

Some pages of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” will be familiar to inveterate readers of Epstein’s literary journalism, all of which carries a strong first-person vibe. Not surprisingly, however, the recycled anecdotage feels less sharp or witty the second time around. But overall, this look back over a long life is consistently entertaining, certainly more page-turner than page-stopper. To enjoy Epstein at his very best, though, you should seek out his earlier essay collections such as “The Middle of My Tether,” “Partial Payments” and “A Line Out for a Walk.” Whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life

Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life

By Joseph Epstein

Free Press. 304 pp. $29.99

Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $20.99

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Manage Your Subscription
• Give a Gift Subscription
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes
• Entertainment

We Were the Lucky Ones : The Biggest Differences Between the Novel and Hulu Series Starring Joey King

The book and the series are based off of Hunter’s family’s experiences during World War II

Carly Tagen-Dye is the Books editorial assistant at PEOPLE, where she writes for both print and digital platforms.

Vlad Cioplea/Hulu

Note: This post contains major spoilers for the novel and show We Were the Lucky Ones.

The Hulu limited series We Were the Lucky Ones sees its series finale Thursday, May 2. Both the show and its source material — the 2017 novel of the same name by Georgia Hunter — follow the Kurc family, who are Polish and Jewish, throughout World War II. Once the war began, the family was scattered across the globe, in places like a ship on the Mediterranean to a Siberian labor camp, and went years without knowing where some members were. The story is based upon the the author’s family’s experiences and stories of survival. Hunter wrote and researched the sprawling novel for nearly a decade, spending time in her family’s Radom hometown and in museums, as well as interviewing her relatives and their descendants. “I went into this particular project as a family historian, not really as an author,” Hunter told PEOPLE of the novel. “I had never written a book before, so I set out in 2008 to unearth and record the family story.”

The Hulu series stars Logan Lerman as Addy Kurc and Joey King as Halina Kurc. The cast also features Henry Lloyd-Hughes as Genek Kurc, Hadas Yaron as Mila Kurc, Amit Rahav as Jakob Kurc, Robin Weigert as Nechuma Kurc, Lior Ashkenazi as Sol Kurc, Sam Woolf as Adam, Michael Aloni as Selim, Eva Feiler as Bella and Moran Rosenblatt as Herta. Though the series stays close to its source material — Hunter also served as an executive producer on the show — there are some slight changes. Here are some of the biggest differences between Hunter’s novel and the Hulu series.

The series and the novel begin differently

In the novel, readers are first introduced to Addy, who, in 1939, is living in Paris and is unable to go back home to Poland for Passover. He has just received a letter from his mother, who warns him that it’s too dangerous to travel across German borders at the start of the war. The series starts out differently, and utilizes a nonlinear timeline. The show opens with the Kurc's youngest child, Halina, at a Red Cross office in Poland in 1945. Halina receives word that her brother, Genek, sister-in-law Herta and brother-in-law, Selim, are alive. The show then cuts to 1938, when Addy returns to Poland from Paris, and the family celebrates their last Passover together before the war.

Bella doesn't travel to Lvov alone

The Kurc family begin to get seperated from one another at the start of the war. Jakob, the Kurc’s youngest son, leaves for Lvov to fight in the military, and his girlfriend, Bella, decides to travel to meet him and to be closer to her sister, Anna.

In the novel, Bella attempts the journey to Lvov alone, traveling by horse and wagon by a man named Tomek. In the show, however, Halina accompanies her. The two are turned back at gunpoint after German officers discover that they are Jewish. Halina and Bella eventually make it to Lvov on their own, where Bella and Jakob get married in a secret ceremony.

A new scene involving Genek is added to the show

A new scene is added to the TV series, taking place when the eldest Kurc child, Genek, and his wife, Herta, are working in a Siberian labor camp after Genek is arrested by soldiers and deemed an enemy of the state. Genek didn’t disclose that he was Jewish and Polish before renting an apartment.  At the camp, Genek attempts to get a doctor and time off for Herta, who is pregnant, but his requests are denied. When his food rations are cut after he didn't show up for work (a prison guard who originally gave him permission later denied doing so), Genek loses his temper and tells off the Commandant about the unfair treatment of prisoners in the camp. No such scene happens in the novel, though Herta and Genek’s son, Józef, is still born in the labor camp.

Mila leaves her job as a nanny under slightly different circumstances

During the war, Mila takes a job as a nanny for a German family, but ultimately has to leave. In the novel, she resigns from her job after her boss confronts her about visiting a seamstress, who is helping Mila to hide her daughter, Felicia, in a Włocławek convent under a false name. In the series, Mila is confronted by her boss after she takes her boss’s son, Edgar, to the park. Edgar is playing a game with other children, where they are pretending to be soldiers and Jews, and complains to Mila about having “to be a Jew.” Mila and her boss get into an argument afterward with her boss saying that Edgar “was accused of being a Jew.”

Both versions of the story see Mila’s boss hitting her over the head with a vase, and Mila vowing to never return to work there.

Adam goes with Mila to find Felicia after a bombing in Warsaw

One of the most harrowing moments in the show and novel is when Mila goes to rescue Felicia in the aftermath of bombing in Warsaw. In the novel, Mila arrives at the convent and searches for her daughter with Tymoteusz, the father of another child. In the show, Halina’s partner, Adam, goes with Mila to rescue Felicia. Eventually, Mila and Adam, along with Halina, parents Sol and Nechuma, and Felicia embark on a journey through the Alps to reunite with Selim, Genek and Herta once the family learns that they are alive.

Addy learns of his family’s survival while with different people

A touching scene in both versions of the story sees Addy receiving news that his family is alive, while he’s living in Brazil. In the book, Addy learns of his family’s survival while with his friend Sebastian, a writer from Poland, who also traveled with Addy on the ship Cabo de Hornos .

In the show, Addy receives the good news while he is with Eliska, his ex-fiancée. In the series, Addy and Eliska stayed in touch, even after they called off their engagement, and Addy began a relationship with an American woman named Caroline.

Related Articles