The Book of Ebenezer Le Page: A Novel [B2319]

1995 PB in nice clean condition. A loveably cantankerous 80-year-old reflects on life, love, and solitude on the isle of Guernsey* in this "masterpiece" hailed as "one of the best novels of our time" (New York Times). Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.

G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller's art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man. *The island of 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' fame.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Never read a novel where a character felt so alive. Gonna miss you, Ebenezer. Thanks for the read"; "Unique, endearing, and equal parts funny and sad. I had never really given Guernsey a thought before reading this, and now I won't forget it.";

"Ebenezer does not feel like a character invented for a novel. He feels like someone who has been sitting somewhere on Guernsey for decades, watching people arrive, fall in love, disappoint one another, grow old, disappear-and remembering what everyone else has forgotten. What moved me most was not the scale of his life, but its smallness. A garden. A quarrel. A face remembered years too late. An island changing almost imperceptibly while one man stubbornly remains himself. G. B. Edwards understands that a human life is rarely made of great events. It is made of ordinary moments that become sacred only after they are gone. There is humor here, tenderness, resentment, loneliness, and that peculiar sadness of surviving long enough to watch your world become a memory. By the final pages, I no longer felt that I had been reading Ebenezer's story. I felt that an old man had been talking to me for several nights, and then, one evening, his chair was suddenly empty. Some books leave you with a conclusion. This one leaves you with an absence."