A New Life

In the late summer of 1950 Seymour Levin arrives at a small town in the American West to take up the post of Instructor in English at the local college. He hopes to escape from his former life in New York; but is his new life to be any better than a Rake's Progress? This richly comic and ironic novel follows Levin's career as he settles into the academic world, charting his views on how to run the English department and his rise and fall as he breaks all the campus rules where women are concerned. But this is not just a highly entertaining story: it is a perceptive and compassionate novel about fidelity and betrayal, the plight of a discontented woman and a frustrated man, personified by Levin. The author's characterisation is, as always, masterly, for he sees beyond appearances to man's aspirations and doubts. [Taken from inside the dust cover]