The Coup - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late 20th century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read--and remembered--for a long time to come.

Book Synopsis

A novel that charts the violent events in an imaginary African nation, as told by the colonel and leader of the country--from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

"What a rich, surprising, and often funny novel."--The New York Times Book Review

"A leader," writes Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, "is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish." Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion--cultural, ideological, and personal--to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into the nation of Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story--always elegantly, and often in the third person--from an undisclosed location in the South of France.

From the Back Cover

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America.

Review Quotes

"One of Updike's boldest and most imaginative performances."--Newsweek

"Ellelloû is an extraordinary tour-de-force of a character. . . . What a rich, surprising, and often funny novel The Coup is."--The New York Times Book Review

"A very funny book as well as a serious one. It's the work of an intelligent and funny and passionate man--and it's good."--The Washington Post Book World

About the Author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.