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Await Your Reply

by Dan Chaon

Await Your Reply Cover

ISBN13: 9780345476036
ISBN10: 0345476034
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

Only 2 left in stock at $9.95!

 

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways — and with unexpected consequences — in acclaimed author Dan Chaon's gripping, brilliantly written new novel.

Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself — through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

Review:

"Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award-finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut — also a book of threes — even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"I've been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it, because he believes in real story and is faithful to the reader."Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections

Review:

"The brilliant Dan Chaon has done it again. Both a genre-bending whodunit and a profound meditation on identity, Await Your Reply left me breathless with admiration. The pages turn themselves." Justin Cronin, author of The Summer Guest

Review:

"This is a stunning and beautiful book. I must have read its final pages half a dozen times, just letting what lay packed and coiled within them settle into me. Out of pure loss, Chaon has created real magnificence. Await Your Reply attains a kind of blurry, bloodstained perfection." Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter

Review:

"Stunning....Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre." New York Times

About the Author

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon's fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:

Brooklyn Joe, January 28, 2012 (view all comments by Brooklyn Joe)
I grabbed a copy of this and read it as soon as it was released after being surprised by how much I loved Chaon's short story collection, "Among the Missing". Chaon is a writer I often recommend to others and find that he's not as widely known as he deserves to be (at least amongst the people I know). As the parallel story lines of "Await Your Reply" unravel and the novel's world gets increasingly murky, I was increasingly anxious to find out how Chaon was going to bring it all to a satisfying conclusion but he does and does it quite skillfully.
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Matthew Holley, January 26, 2012 (view all comments by Matthew Holley)
This was the best book I read in 2011, for sure. Chaon keeps all three storylines completely engrossing, and I was often "on the edge of my seat", as they say. I plowed through this book because I needed to know what happened next! A masterfully written novel.
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View all 2 comments

Product Details

ISBN:
9780345476036
Author:
Chaon, Dan
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Subject:
General
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Edition Description:
Trade paper
Series:
Random House Reader's Circle
Publication Date:
20100631
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
348
Dimensions:
7.90x5.10x.80 in. .65 lbs.

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Related Subjects

Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z
Languages » Foreign Languages » Spanish » Fiction and Poetry » Popular Fiction » Contemporary Thrillers

Await Your Reply Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$9.95 In Stock
Product details 348 pages Ballantine Books - English 9780345476036 Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review" by , "Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award-finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut — also a book of threes — even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review" by , "I've been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it, because he believes in real story and is faithful to the reader."
"Review" by , "The brilliant Dan Chaon has done it again. Both a genre-bending whodunit and a profound meditation on identity, Await Your Reply left me breathless with admiration. The pages turn themselves."
"Review" by , "This is a stunning and beautiful book. I must have read its final pages half a dozen times, just letting what lay packed and coiled within them settle into me. Out of pure loss, Chaon has created real magnificence. Await Your Reply attains a kind of blurry, bloodstained perfection."
"Review" by , "Stunning....Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre."
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