Appointment in Samarra - (Cletham Classics) by John O'Hara (Paperback)

About the Book

Appointment in Samarra is a novel about pressure and about how little it takes for a life built on appearances to come apart.

Book Synopsis

It begins with a drink thrown in a moment of anger--public, irreversible, and instantly understood. From that point on, everything closes in. Business relationships sour, social standing slips, money tightens, and the small evasions that once held life together stop working. What follows unfolds over just a few days, with a precision that makes every misstep feel both accidental and inevitable. Appointment in Samarra is a novel about pressure and about how little it takes for a life built on appearances to come apart. O'Hara writes without flourish and without relief. He offers no grand catastrophe, only a sequence of recognisable choices, each narrowing the field until there is nowhere left to go.

About the Author

John O'Hara (1905-1970) wrote with a clarity that bordered on mercilessness. No ornament, no consolation. Only the exact pressures of class, ambition, and self-destruction. With his first novel, he produced one of the most precise accounts of social and personal collapse in American fiction.