The Coup - Paperback

by John Updike (Author)

A novel that charts the violent events in an imaginary African nation, as told by the colonel and leader of the country--from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

"What a rich, surprising, and often funny novel."--The New York Times Book Review

"A leader," writes Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, "is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish." Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion--cultural, ideological, and personal--to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into the nation of Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story--always elegantly, and often in the third person--from an undisclosed location in the South of France.

Front Jacket

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read -- and remembered -- for a long time to come.

Back Jacket

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America.

Author Biography

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.