{"product_id":"9781429932356","title":"The Escape: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eHaffner is charming, morally suspect, vain, obsessed by the libertine emperors. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But Haffner's attachments to his nation, his race, his marriage, have always been matters of conjecture. They have always been subjects of debate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere are many stories of Haffner—but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all. \u003ci\u003eThe Escape \u003c\/i\u003eopens in a spa town snug in the unfashionable eastern Alps, where Haffner has come to claim his wife's inheritance: a villa expropriated in darker times. After weeks of ignoring his task in order to conduct two affairs—one with a capricious young yoga instructor, the other with a hungrily passionate married woman—he discovers gradually that he wants this villa, very much. Squabbling with bureaucrats and their shadows means a fight, and Haffner wants anything he has to fight for.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow can you ever escape your past, your family, your history? That is the problem of Haffner's story in \u003ci\u003eThe Escape\u003c\/i\u003e. That has always been the problem of Haffner—and his lifetime of metamorphoses and disappearances. How might Haffner ever become unattached?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough the improvised digressions of his comic couplings and uncouplings emerge the stories of Haffner's century: the chaos of World War II , the heyday of jazz, the postwar diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Escape \u003c\/i\u003eis a swift, sad farce of sexual mayhem by a brilliant young novelist \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003ehas called \"a prodigy and, as such, unstoppable.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47154192875760,"sku":"9781429932356","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429932356_p0.jpg?v=1769902451","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429932356","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}