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A Fool's Alphabet

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Amidst the letters of the alphabet, a life reveals itself. Flashing backwards and forwards through time, we meet Pietro Russell. As a photographer in Sri Lanka, a schoolboy in Fulham and even before he was born to his wounded English father and young Italian mother. The extraordinary moments of Pietro's life are navigated with unique imagination, giving the reader a chance to view a life from a new and moving vantage point.

A Fool's Alphabet is a novel of true invention from a master storyteller that sees life in all of its compelling, poignant glory.

'Ambitious and beautifully crafted' THE TIMES
'Faulks writes with great emotional authority' SUNDAY TIMES

© Sebastian Faulks 1992 (P) Penguin Audio 2011

 20th Century Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

The best novelist of his generation
A conventionally-told tale in an unconventional narrative form
Faulks writes with great emotional authority... There are the same escapist pleasures, too: meals are described in rapt, mouthwatering detail, whitewashed villages and Mediterranean seascapes brought to such vivid life that you want to jump on the nearest aeroplane and see them for yourself
Sebastian Faulks's third and most magnificent novel is a 'feel-good' experience from cover to cover
Elevated by some delicate prose, particularly in evocation of childhood and adolescence, A Fool's Alphabet is a poignant and highly readable novel that runs the gamut of experience from well, from A to Z
An ambitious and beautifully crafted novel
All stars
Most relevant
Beautiful just beautiful.
No phrase, no sentence could be disliked. A Faulks favourite of mine.

Beautiful.

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