A Calling for Charlie Barnes
- Author Joshua Ferris
- Narrator Nick Offerman
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date 16 September 2021
- Run Time 11 hours and 29 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Family life fiction, Humorous fiction, Intergenerational relationships: advice and issues, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Interior life.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
From the Booker-shortlisted author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour comes a novel about fathers, sons, thwarted dreams and confronting the reality of who we really are
Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie.
He certainly seems simple enough: he's a striver, a romantic, and a thoroughgoing capitalist. But suddenly blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news, he might have to rethink his life from top to bottom, and on short notice. What makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?
'Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write' Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
'Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest' Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
'Wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant . . . A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities' Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
© Joshua Ferris 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Critics Review
A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have
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