Ordinary People - by Judith Guest (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

One of the foremost literary bestsellers of our time, now in a 50th-anniversary edition featuring a new foreword by psychoanalyst and New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Amy Bloom

A Penguin Classic

They were a perfect family. Calvin was a successful provider and Beth a fastidious wife. They had two sons, Buck and Conrad, but now they have one.

When originally published, Ordinary People introduced an original American voice. It sold more than a million copies and inspired the 1980 Academy Award-winning movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, and Timothy Hutton. Fifty years later, it remains an iconic novel, distinguished by Judith Guest's ear for dialogue and her unflinching portrait of one family's reckoning with grief.

Review Quotes

"Guest has the ability to move a toughened reviewer to tears." --Newsweek

"Admirable . . . touching . . . full of the anxiety, despair, and joy that are common to every human experience of suffering and growth." --The New York Times

"Rejoice! A novel for all ages and all seasons." --The Washington Post Book World

"Stirring, powerful . . . It mines marriage, family, and sexes with meaning, rejecting sarcasm, bite, and snark. . . . This is good writing." --Classic Chicago Magazine

"Excellent . . . It manages to resonate deeply with readers fifty years after its publication . . . because it captures the truth that being human is complicated, and fragile, and also worth it. It was ahead of its time in exploring mental health, family dysfunction, and the longing for understanding. . . . The therapy scenes . . . are important ones in modern American fiction. . . . [They] remain fresh and moving. . . . This is a book for and about ordinary people, living through extraordinary pain, disappointment, and the difficult, beautiful journey of being human." --Amy Bloom, from the Foreword

About the Author

Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, which was made into the Academy Award-winning 1980 film of the same name. Her other novels are Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill), Errands, and The Tarnished Eye. Guest lives with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Harrisville, Michigan.