Anita Shreve

Click on the video below to watch footage from Anita Shreve’ s recent Q&A session at a London bookshop, on the launch of her latest novel Testimony.

Anita Shreve’s Testimony has had the UK critics drooling:

 ’Anita Shreve’s latest novel, Testimony is one of her best. With her acute eye for behaviour and an exquisite ear for dialogue, Shreve explores the actions and reaction that will destroy a community through their all-too-human desires’  Express

‘Anita Shreve is back on cracking form with Testimony. What is so fresh and resonant about this novel is the clever way in which the author unpacks the events with a series of separate narratives. Each voice contributes an additional layer of impasto to the picture; each layer, in turn, has to be mined carefully for its information and character and situation. Poised and absolutely steady-handed, this is a gripping piece of deconstruction’ Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times

‘Anita Shreve is a phenomenon. As ever – and even though the novel is written from different points of view – the power of Shreve’s writing lies in it relentless passivity. The prose is undemonstrative, yet insidiously accomplished. For some, it may be reassuring that an author who can command a readership as large as Shreve’s should choose to write a novel of this sort. On the surface, it is a brave, uncompromising choice for someone occasionally criticised as being a “woman’s writer”. Yet I think that Testimony goes further than this. It is so unforgiving of a panoply of human frailty as to be misanthropic’ Charlie Hill, New Statesman
 
‘A perfectly pitched account of human fallibility and the snares of temptation’  Daily Mail

‘Her experience as a storyteller shows in the writing, which is deft, the multiple voices authentic and subtly characterized. The love between Silas and his girlfriend Noelle is untouched by the cynicism around them. The other characters are perhaps too flawed to be likeable – there is a sense of each having brought disaster to themselves – but the two young loves are moving. Overall, however, Testimony is a story of ordinary people and of the ripples that spread out from the decisions they make. It touches on questions of privilege, class, community, and where we lay the blame when things fall apart’ Kate Salter, TLS 

‘Shreve knows how to hook your attention… Testimony is a page-turner, its language crisp and uncluttered’ Daily Telegraph

‘A narrative structure and a sense of place and character as delicate as a spider’s web… At every level, our sympathies are engaged or repelled by qualities of voice – querulous, self-serving, coolly appraising, sleazy, hurt, confused, and oddly rhapsodic. The campus novel has often been thought to be a peculiarly male preserve, but it subtlest exponents have tended to be female: Mary McCarthy, Alison Lurie, Donna Tartt, and now Shreve. Shreve manages this aspect of the novel beautifully.  It is worth comparing Testimony with Ian McEwan’s over-praised Atonement. Testimony is also a sobering and chastening indictment of family, social, legal and educational life. Not quite, perhaps, a “condition of America” novel, but as close as anyone since Donna Tartt has dared to come’ Brian Morton, Sunday Herald

‘If Zoe Heller hadn’t already used the title Notes On A Scandal, it would have suited this novel… Shreve’s prose is spare and powerful, and she excels in showing how two people might perceive and interpret the same event in a contrasting way. [An] elegant and addictive novel about the way our lives can be shaped forever’ Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday

‘Stylistically and structurally, Testimony recalls some of the literary devices favoured particularly by Joyce Carol Oates, and Shreve employs them to good effect. Shreve’s premise for her novel is thoroughly intriguing; and, as with Shriver’s and Picoult’s books, which have also dealt with teenage violence or sex, it’s a highly timely one’ Lesley McDowell, Scotsman

‘Shreve has delivered a novel that not only gets under the skin of its characters, but also under the reader’s skin, as the voices testify to the saga’s tragic conclusion’ Sunday Business Post

‘As each account of those involved unfolds, she expertly draws us into this heartbreaking tale’ In Style

‘Told with pace and intensity, the novel shows how one mistake can cause a ripple effect’ Eve

‘The brilliant Anita Shreve returns with another emotionally charged story that will keep you hooked until the final page’ Bella

‘A tense read’ Woman & Home

‘I’ve loved all her novels because she writes so beautifully. Her characterisation is fantastic’ Twiggy in She

Read an extract from Testimony.

Order a copy from the Little, Brown Book Group website.

Anita Shreve appears as part of the Why I Write series in this article in the Guardian newspaper.

The Times newspaper features an interview with Anita Shreve in which she talks about her new book Testimony and why her novels are often driven by the consequences of a single, reckless act.

The Times are sponsors of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, at which Anita will be appearing on October 10th.

Click here to read the article.

Anita Shreve’s new novel Testimony is published today in the UK by Little, Brown.  Read an extract.

An audiobook edition is also available on CD from Hachette Digital.  It is read by Read by Adam Sims and Jennifer Woodward. Click here for details.

To celebrate publication of her new novel Testimony, Anita Shreve will be appearing at the following UK events in October:

Wednesday 8th October, 7pm
Evening event at Waterstones’ Piccadilly, London
Anita Shreve in conversation with Viv Groskop
Tel: 0207 851 2400
E-mail: events@piccadilly.waterstones.com

Thursday 9th October, 8.00pm
Manchester Literature Festival
The Dance House Theatre, 10 Oxford Road, Manchester

Friday 10th October, 8.45pm                      
Cheltenham Festival                                            
In conversation with Pamela Armstrong
www.everymantheatre.org.uk

Anita Shreve’s new novel Testimony is published in the UK by Little, Brown on October 2nd.

Here is an exclusive extract.  (Click here to download it as a PDF).

It was a small cassette, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, and when Mike thought about the terrible license and risk exhibited on the tape, as well as its resultant destructive power, it was as though the two-by-three plastic package had been radioactive. Which it may as well have been, since it had produced something very like radiation sickness throughout the school, reducing the value of an Avery education, destroying at least two marriages that he knew of, ruining the futures of three students, and, most horrifying of all, resulting in a death. After Kasia brought Mike the tape in a white letter envelope (as if he might be going to mail it to someone!), Mike walked home with it and watched it on his television — an enormously complicated and frustrating task since he first had to find his own movie camera that used similar tapes and figure out how to connect its various cables to the television so that the tape could play through the camera. Sometimes Mike wished he had just slipped the offensive tape into a pot of boiling water, or sent it out with the trash in a white plastic drawstring bag, or spooled it out with a pencil and wadded it into a big mess. Although he doubted he could have controlled the potential scandal, he might have been able to choreograph it differently, possibly limiting some of the damage…

He lay his head back against the sofa and closed his eyes. The house was empty and quiet. He could hear the wind skidding against the windows and, from the kitchen, the sound of ice cubes tumbling in the Viking, recently installed. Tasks now needed to be accomplished, students queried, the Disciplinary Committee convened, and all of this conducted beneath the radar of the press, which would, if they got wind of the story, revel in a private- school scandal. In this, Mike thought that private schools had been unfairly singled out. He doubted that such a tape would have been of any interest to the press had it surfaced at the local regional high school, for example. The tape might have circulated underground, students might have been expelled, and meetings might have been held, yet it was likely that the incident would have been greeted with indifference not only by the local newspaper, the Avery Crier (its editor, Walter Myers, could be talked down from just about any story that might cause embarrassment to local kids and parents), but also by the regional and national press. Mike thought the national media would scoff at the idea that sex and alcohol, even sex and alcohol involving a fourteen-year-old girl in a public-high-school setting, was news of any sort; whereas if the same set of facts, but in a private-school setting, were to pass across the computer screen of a reporter at the Rutland Herald or the Boston Globe, it was entirely possible that the reporter would be dispatched to Avery to find out what was going on. In such a story, there was juice, there was heat, there was blood. There was also, if this tape had been copied in any way, footage. Was it because private schools were held to higher standards, according to which such an incident ought to be nearly unthinkable? Or was it because everyone loved to see the elite (even if that elite involved a local farmer’s son on scholarship) brought down and ridiculed? A little of both, Mike guessed, with emphasis on the latter.
            More troubling, however, was the thought of police involvement. Though Mike felt nothing but revulsion when he thought of the Silas and Rob he’d just seen on the tape (boys whom he had previously much respected and even, in Silas’s case, been quite fond of), the idea of them being led away from the administration building in handcuffs was appalling. (Did police routinely handcuff boys suspected of sexual assault, which was what this particular crime, in the state of Vermont, was deemed?) Police in this case meant either Gary Quinney or Bernie Herrmann, neither of whom would find any satisfaction in the arrest; Gary was, after all, Silas’s uncle. Would the boys then appear some months later in the dowager courthouse across the street from the gates of Avery, the building itself smug in its self-righteousness? Mike’s job would be at risk, and any number of teachers who were supposed to be supervising either the dance or the dorm that evening might be fired, for one could not expect the trustees to view the incident and its attendant legal fuss lightly. Would the boys then go to jail, to the Vermont State Prison at Windsor, where almost certainly they would be raped in turn?
            Mike reined in his thoughts. He was getting carried away. No, he had to get a grip and act quickly. Three boys were in trouble, and a girl … well, presumably, if it did turn out to be a case of sexual assault, the trouble had already occurred to the girl, though the fallout for her might be endless.
            Mike got up off the floor and sat on the sofa while he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, as if increasing blood flow to the brain might help solve his problem. And it was then that the word containment entered his mind. And with that word, moral, ethical, and political choices were made, though Mike would realize the implications of these only later, when it occurred to him that he might have chosen at that moment another word, such as revelation, say, or help.

Pre-order your copy of Testimony now from littlebrown.co.uk:

click here for the Little, Brown hardback

or here for the CD of the Hachette Digital audiobook read by Adam Sims and Jennifer Woodward

Anita Shreve’s Body Surfing is out now in paperback.  It is published in the UK by Abacus.

Visit the book’s page for an extract, reading group guide and reviews.

Anita Shreve has a brand new book coming out in October, Testimony. It’s a fantastically topical novel exploring privacy and teen issues. This is the blurb:

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora’s box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voice — those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal — that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.

A gripping emotional drama with the pace of a thriller, Anita Shreve’s Testimony explores the dark impulses that sway the lives of seeming innocents, and the ways in which our best intentions can lead to our worst transgressions.

Anita Shreve will be coming to the UK in late 2008. As soon as we have futher details we will post them here.