Rabbit at Rest

By: John Updike

Narrated by: William Hope

It's 1989, and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is far from restful. Harry is 56 and overweight, and he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern.

His son, Nelson, is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore but somehow can't. He has to make the most of life, after all. He doesn't have much time left....

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He attended Shillington High School, Harvard College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, where he spent a year on a Knox Fellowship. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he contributed numerous poems, short stories, essays and book reviews. After 1957 he lived in Massachusetts until his death.

John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959. It was followed by Rabbit, Run, the first volume of what have become known as the Rabbit books.

Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

©1990 John Updike (P)2015 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"His misplaced sense of responsibility - plus his crude sexual urges and racial slurs - can make Rabbit seem less than lovable. Still, there's something utterly heroic about his character. When the end comes, after all, it's the Angstrom family that refuses to accept the reality of Rabbit's mortality. Only Updike's irreplaceable mouthpiece rises to the occasion, delivering a stoical, one-word valediction: 'Enough.'" (Rob McDonald).

"One of the finest literary achievements to have come out of the US since the war." (John Banville)