Light Years - (Vintage International) by James Salter (Paperback)

About the Book

This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. Even as he lingers over the lustrous surface of Viri and Nedra's marriage, James Salter makes us see the cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will in time mar it beyond repair. "An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time".

Book Synopsis

A brilliant portrait of a marriage from the PEN/Faulkner Award-winner and author of A Sport and a Pastime, with an introduction by Richard Ford.

"Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring."--Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies

"Remarkable. An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."--James Wolcott, Esquire

"[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic."--Bloomsbury Review

Nedra and Viri's favored life revolves around delightful dinners, imaginative games with their children, enviable friends, and idyllic days spent skating on a frozen river or basking in the sun on the beach. But even as Salter lingers over the surface of their marriage, he lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair.

Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness--and then felt compelled to destroy it.

Review Quotes

"Extraordinary . . . at once tender, exultant, unabashedly sexual, sensual, and profoundly sad. Light Years is a masterpiece."
--Elizabeth Benedict, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Remarkable. . . . Salter celebrates the silver-and-golden bitterness of life. Light Years . . . becomes an unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."
--James Wolcott, Esquire

"[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic."
--Bloomsbury Review

"An absolutely beautiful, monstrous, important book."
--Joy Williams

"Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring."
--Lauren Groff
"For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years.... As a writer, I am shamelessly in its debt."
--Jhumpa Lahiri, The Paris Review
"Light Years, for its relative compactness, is, like all great works of fiction, no easy novel to sum up, so nuanced is its view of human beings, so rich and varied its fictive effects, so large its intention."
--Richard Ford, from his Introduction
"Every time I read [James Salter's] work I feel a kindred spirit there and am convinced all over again that the way we write a sentence can be everything: exploration, devotion, celebration."
--George Saunders, The Southampton Review

About the Author

James Salter authored numerous books, including the novels All That Is, Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, written with his wife, Kay Salter. He died in 2015.