Stoner

Read the greatest rediscovered classic of recent years

A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life Ian McEwan

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.

A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel Nick Hornby

A terrific novel of echoing sadness Julian Barnes