Seek My Face - Tapa dura

John Updike's new novel is an audacious and compelling look at postwar American art - and the relations between men and women, and women and women.

SEEK MY FACE takes place on one day in Vermont in spring 2001. The 79-year-old painter Hope Cafetz, who has been in her eventful life Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a young New York interviewer, Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own times, the triumphant saga of post-war American art.

In the evolving relationship between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, annunciatory angel and startled receptacle of grace.

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton.

His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal.

Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.