Ben Markovitz The Rest of Our Lives review, recensie en informatie over de inhoud van de roman van de in Texas geboren Britse schrijver. Op 27 maart 2025 verschijnt bij Faber & Faber de nieuwe roman van schrijver Benjamin Markovitz. De roman is door de jury geselecteerd voor de longlist van de Booker Prize 2025. Een Nederlandse vertaling van de roman is niet verkrijgbaar.
Ben Markovitz The Rest of Our Lives review en recensie
- “When Tom Layward’s wife cheated on him, he stayed for the children but promised to leave when his youngest turned eighteen. Twelve years later, Tom drops his daughter off at college, but instead of driving back to New York he heads west. What follows is a remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery. It’s clear author Ben Markovits has spent time teaching. This novel speaks like a much-loved professor, one whose classes have a terribly long waitlist. It’s matter of fact, effortlessly warm, and it uses the smallest parts of human behaviour to uphold bigger themes, like mortality, sickness, and love. The Rest of Our Lives is a novel of sincerity and precision. We found it difficult to put it down.” (Booker Prize 2025 jury)
- “We all fear irrelevance as technology and society outpace us, and as the young outgrow us. Yet, reading Ben Markovits’s gentle, powerful and funny novel, we are reminded that family love can ground us and keep us together.” (Philip Womack, Times Literary Supplement)
- “The Rest of Our Lives is another quiet triumph, an elegant, devastating book that lays bare the way time calcifies our failures, how we find ourselves trapped not by circumstance but by the slow erosion of the will to escape. Markovits has long been one of our most under-appreciated novelists; this is yet more proof that he deserves far greater recognition.” (Alex Preston, Guardian)
The Rest of Our Lives
- Auteur: Ben Markovitz (Engeland, Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: familieroman
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Faber & Faber
- Verschijnt: 27 maart 2025
- Omvang: 256 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Prijs: £ 16,99
- Shortlist Booker Prize 2025
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol
Flaptekst van de roman van Ben Markovitz
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair, the synopsis reads, ‘he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact. He is also on the run from his own health issues, and the fact that he’s been put on leave at work after students complained about the politics of his law class – something he hasn’t yet told his wife.
So, after dropping Miriam off, he keeps driving, with the vague plan of visiting various people from his past – an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son – en route, maybe, to his father’s grave in California. Pitch perfect, quietly exhilarating and moving, The Rest of Our Lives is a novel about family, marriage and those moments which may come to define us.
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. His novels include Either Side of Winter, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, Christmas in Austin, and, most recently, The Sidekick. He has published essays, stories, poetry and reviews in the Guardian, Granta, The Paris Review and the New York Times, among others. In 2013 Granta selected him as one of their Best of Young British Novelists and in 2015 he won the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
