Download October Light AudioBook Free
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. New Directions is excited to reissue the Gardner classics, beginning with October Light, a complex relationship rendered in a down-to-earth narrative. October Light is one of John Gardner's masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in almost every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister's color television set set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy "blockbuster" novel that has consumed her (in support of apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses in to the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people. Gardner uses the turbulent siblings as a stepping-off point that he expands upon the lives of the extended families, and the rural community that surrounds them. He also engages larger issues of how liberals and conservatives define themselves, and considers those occasions when life transcends almost all their arguments.
