Falconer » (First Vintage International edition)

A master of the short story, John Cheever helped make the New Yorker's fiction section a reliably good read from the 1950s up until his death in the early '80s. Often featuring unhappy, upper-middle-class characters, Cheever depicted the underside of living well with an unwavering eye.

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

Charles McGrath

....Falconer seems to be a conventional novel of crime, punishment and redemption. -- The New York Times Books of the Century