Who says you can't run away from your problems?
You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes - it would be too awkward - and you can't say no - it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
263 pages (July 2017)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
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Andrew Sean Greer talking about Less with Nancy Pearl on Book Lust:
This title is available for download as an eAudioBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane; Love by Roddy Doyle; Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith; Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier; Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner; Honestly, We Meant Well by Grant Ginder; A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall by Andy Abramowitz; This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison; Heart of Junk by Luke Geddes; George and Lizzie by Nancy Pearl; There There by Tommy Orange; Normal People by Sally Rooney; and The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.
