Table of Contents: Beginner's Greek

Author: James Collins
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2008
Synopsis: When Peter Russell finally meets the woman of his dreams he falls as madly in love as you can on a flight from New York to LA. Her name is Holly. She's achingly pretty with strawberry-blonde hair, and reads Thomas Mann for pleasure. She gives Peter her phone number on a page of The Magic Mountain , but in his room that night Peter finds the page is inexplicably, impossibly, enragingly...gone. So begins the immensely entertaining story of Peter and his unrequited love for his best friend's girl; of Charlotte and her less-than-perfect marriage to a man in love with someone else; of Jonathan and his wicked and fateful debauchery; and of Holly, the impetus for it all. Along the way, there's the evil boss, the desirable temptress, miscommunications, misrepresentations, fiendish behavior, letters gone astray, and ultimately, an ending in which every character gets his due. Both incisive and wonderfully funny, this is a brilliantly understated comedy of manners in which love lost is found again.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"...“Beginner’s Greek” is, from start to finish, delicious."

Pop Matters
"...is resolutely old fashioned"

USA Today
"... a literary love story for grown-ups..."

Entertainment Weekly
"[Collins] makes magic of it all by infusing those would-be clichés with so much old-school charm that you want to believe, and with so much patient detail that you actually can."

Christian Science Monitor
"...has a rare ability to satirize without becoming nasty, and periodically gives romantic clichés a good tweak"

New York Daily news
"...filled with charming twists of fate in the lives of New York's poshest."

San Francisco Chronicel
""Beginner's Greek" touches on all the traditional details of a comedy of manners..."

Washington Post
"Though Collins crafts the occasional charming scene or sentence, he routinely serves up clunkers such as referring to a man's formal footwear as "black patent leather pumps"..."

New York Observer
"He has acquitted himself admirably as far as a potentially commercial entertainment is concerned. But as the phrase went in the days before e-mail, parts of his novel seem to have been phoned in."

Extras:
Read the First Chapter Online!