What I Loved: The International Bestseller - Tapa blanda

A powerful novel of love, loss and longing, exquisitely written * Anne Donovan, Sunday Herald * Hustvedt ranks amongst the finest American writers working today * Jennifer O'Connell, Sunday Business Post * Subtle, compassionate, wise, and supremely intelligent, it's a striking achievement. * Kieron Corless, Time Out * Riveting ... erudite and immensely detailed ... a rich, densely textured and utterly absorbing novel * Lesley Glaister * A consummately intelligent novel, highly literate but also intensely moving. * Jackie McGlone, Scotsman * A big, wide, sensuous novel - clever, sinister, yet attractively real * Julie Myerson, Guardian * Substantial, moving and beautifully written * Christian House, Independent on Sunday * Defiantly complex and frequently dazzling ... she has created a conceptually exciting work that demands we think, but which still allows us room to feel. * Alex Clark, Sunday Times * A love story with the grip and suspense of a thriller. It makes you ponder human existence with a peculiar mixture of stoicism and wonder. * Noonie Minogue, Times Literary Supplement * Breathtaking * James Urquhart, Independent *

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children - Leo's son drowns when he's 12, while Bill's son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.