Product Description

"The End of Alice" treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday and caused a major controversy when it was first released in the US. The story centres on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third year in prison; the other, his bland-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, is a nineteenth-year-old woman intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Slowly, through these letters, the narrator's monstrous character emerges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201579 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A novel that shines a flashlight under the bed of suburban perversity. A.M. Homes, whom the N.Y. Times Book Review calls "exhilaratingly perverse", lures us into a Nabokovian world where characters both repellent and seductive conduct forays into the dark depths of their obsessions.

Review
"* 'A.M. Homes never plays it safe and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything' Michael Cunningham * 'If the first major literary marker of the American dream of aspiration, potential and never-ending youth was F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyrical piece of doomed yearning, The Great Gatsby, its postmodern flipside [is] A.M. Homes's The End of Alice, whose paired literary voices made a grotesque harmony of two yearners after the dream of youth' Ali Smith, Guardian * 'A.M. Homes instructs us about ourselves and shows us what we are blighted with and cringe from, our compulsions, repressions, longings, glimpses of madness' Ruth Rendell * 'Undeniably shocking... Superbly achieved by a writer who is a true artist in words' Vogue"

About the Author
AM Homes is the author of several novels -, In a Country of Mothers, Music for Torching, and Jack - and two collections of short stories, The Safety of Objects and the recent highly acclaimed Things You Should Know all published by Granta. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and teaches in the writing programme at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Her latest novel, This Book Will Save Your Life is published by Granta this month.

Customer Reviews

Riveting and seductive...but hesitate
The most riveting, seductive book that I have ever read...and hesitate to recommend to others. Homes is an amazing writer. The inner world she creates inside the pedophile's head weaves it's own spell upon the reader, drawing one into a maze of logic unto its own *reality*. The reader is seduced into a point of view that warps the truth and charms in a perverse and oddly mesmerizing way. What bravery in tackling such repulsive subjectmatter. I recently read an interview with Homes, and she spoke of the anger that the book has evoked in people. Well dear reader, be warned. If you are able to face the shadow in your own self, and endure a little squirming in your *safe* little seat...read this dangerous and dark insightful tale. I myself will order her newest novel with great anticipation, " Music for Torching".

Deliberately confrontational, deeply disturbing and very good
This is not a book for the lily-livered. Bold, courageous and confrontational, The End of Alice is most disturbing. It is also very, very good. There is absolutely nothing engaging or delightful in this story which relates, through correspondence, the exploits of an imprisoned paedophile and his young, wild prototype. It is uncomfortable reading: repulsive and gripping in almost equal measure. Deliberately shocking, Homes forces unpleasant questions, at each and every turn of the page judging perfectly how readers are likely to react, catching them in their own doubts with scary precision. The erotic correspondence, delicious to the letter writers, works well in revealing how a paedophile, imprisoned twenty three years ago, is also witty and intelligent, manipulative and guiltily complicit. Turning the final page comes as a relief: can't imagine anyone actually enjoying reading this novel but it is rewarding in its own way. A unforgettable literary questioning of liberalism and modernity, it deserves attention.

Not an easy read.
Ultimately, the subject matter of this book might make it difficult for many readers to even pick it up. But if you do, you will be rewarded with a creepy, yet wonderfully written novel which is at times so shocking I had to put it down. If you like your fiction disturbing but intelligent then I would suggest you give this a try.