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In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
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In the Beauty of the Lilies

A Novel

$27.50

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Jason Culp

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Length 20 hours 18 minutes
Language English
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Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.

JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

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Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Make the switch
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Reviews

“Dazzling . . . a book that forces us to reassess the American Dream and the crucial role that faith (and the longing for faith) have played in shaping the national soul.”—The New York Times
 
“Stirring and captivating and beautifully written . . . This is the Updike of the Rabbit books, who can take you uphill and down with his grace of vision, his gossamer language, and his merciful, ironic glance at the misery of the human condition.”—The Boston Globe

“Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured.”—George Steiner, The New Yorker Expand reviews
Get two free audiobooks AND support local bookstores Make the switch