Less: A Novel

A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of “arresting lyricism & beauty” – New York Times Book Review

"I could not love LESS more." - Ron Charles, Washington Post 

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes - it would all be too awkward - & you can’t say no - it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world. 

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all.  If you are Arthur Less.  Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India &  Japan & put thousands of miles between him & the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?  A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time & the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy. A generous book, musical in its prose &  expansive in its structure & range, about growing older & the essential nature of love.

"Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching & be-wonderful."      - Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review

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Andrew Sean Greer (b 1970) is an American novelist & short-story writer.  He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, whichthe New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” & The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of t