Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers

Published:10th Nov '11

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in other editions too:

Play It As It Lays cover

A gripping literary fiction psychological thriller novel

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.

One thing in my defence, not that it matters: I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth’s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and pleasure, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives – the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.

More than five decades after its original publication, Play it as it Lays remains a profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.

‘She writes with a razor … You are both frightened and astonished … It seems to me just about perfect, so heartbreaking and inescapableNew York Times

‘Didion’s modant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurtsTime, Top 100 Novels of All Time

‘For a few decades, this was my favourite modern American novel … revelatory’ Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

ISBN: 9780007414987

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 14mm

Weight: 150g

224 pages