• Turtle Diary
1 1

Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban, introduction by Ed Park

$16.95
$0.00 $16.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Literature in English Reading Group Guide
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

Modern existence can be atomizing, isolating. Certainly it is for William G. and Neaera H., the lonely Londoners at the center of Russell Hoban’s prickly yet heartwarming Turtle Diary. William works at a used-book store and lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has stripped him of his home, family, and career. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation “looks the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks … like a man’s woman and hasn’t got a man.” By inexplicable coincidence each is irresistibly drawn to the turtle tank at the London Zoo with a mind “full of turtle thoughts,” wondering how the creatures might be freed. Then one day Neaera wanders into William’s bookstore, and together they form an unlikely partnership that will prove a small, and perhaps lasting, triumph of humanity and sympathy.

Turtle Diary is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for June 2013.

Download the Reading Group Guide for Turtle Diary.Russell Hoban, introduction by Ed Park

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590176467
Pages: 208
Publication Date:

Praise

A story about the recovery of life...Like other cult writers—Salinger for instance, or Vonnegut--Hoban writes about ordinary people making life-affirming gestures in a world that threatens to dissolve in madness.
—Newsweek

Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony.
—Time

This wonderful, life-saving fantasy will place Russell Hoban where he has got to be—among the greatest, timeless novelists.
—The Times (UK)

The marvellous energy of Mr. Hoban's writing, simultaneously dry and passionate, justifies everything he does.
—Times Educational Supplement

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it