-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:"Like Edward feels upon discovering a transcendent piece of art, this book finds that little opening at the edge of your soul and seeps in."
Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalist of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living.
As a portrait of middle-aged vulnerability and weakness, this is a rich story with a believable, complex central character. Edward might choose the worst imaginable moment to reveal the secret from his past to his wife, Holly, but he remains a sympathetic character, even when his failings are most obvious. The marriage between the two celebrity artists is also intriguing, with suggestions of competition and manipulation between the pair. The Prize is a moving, well-crafted novel but at times the drama lacks urgency. Bialosky has a penchant for mirroring her character's interior struggles or disappointments in descriptive passages that slow the narrative...continued
Full Review
(405 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).
The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world in many ways and naturally, that change has been reflected in the arts and humanities. In film, fiction, theatre and more, artists from across the globe have responded to the tragedy in many ways and on many levels.
"After 9/11," writes Jill Bialosky in her novel The Prize, "many artists questioned how they could make the same work they had made before." In the book, Agnes Murray and her husband Nate explore "the legacy of 9/11" in their work. Although they are fictional characters, in the real world, many continue to respond to 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror.
In film, United 93 (2006), charts the hijacking of a plane bound for San Francisco from Newark on the morning of ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked The Prize, try these:
by John Banville
Published 2016
John Banville, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves
by Stuart Archer Cohen
Published 2016
Part satire, part revenge tale, part wilderness adventure - with a heavy dash of noire espionage - This Is How It Really Sounds explores the seductive power of the Other Life, and what happens when you finally grasp it...
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Elizabeth Berg, author of Open House
A compulsively readable novel about art: both that on the canvas, and that of finding one's home in another.
