Light Years - Paperback

by James Salter (Author)

A brilliant portrait of a marriage from the PEN/Faulkner Award-winner and author of A Sport and a Pastime, with an introduction by Richard Ford.

"Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring."--Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies

"Remarkable. An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."--James Wolcott, Esquire

"[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic."--Bloomsbury Review

Nedra and Viri's favored life revolves around delightful dinners, imaginative games with their children, enviable friends, and idyllic days spent skating on a frozen river or basking in the sun on the beach. But even as Salter lingers over the surface of their marriage, he lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair.

Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness--and then felt compelled to destroy it.

Front Jacket

This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. Even as he lingers over the lustrous surface of Viri and Nedra's marriage, James Salter makes us see the cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will in time mar it beyond repair. "An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."

Author Biography

James Salter authored numerous books, including the novels All That Is, Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, written with his wife, Kay Salter. He died in 2015.