{"product_id":"9780679748366","title":"The Great World","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Great World\u003c\/i\u003e is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epic—despite having some of that form's easy pleasures—and render it poetic.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47027312787696,"sku":"9780679748366","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780679748366_p0.jpg?v=1763608318","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780679748366","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}