Less

Less

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Desc: 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.