These eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village’, about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding and losing moments of romantic rapport, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Now these stories appear in a single volume in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story ‘Grandparenting’, which returns us to the Maples long after their wrenching divorce. Together, The Maples Stories offers a nuanced portrait of a flawed marriage between two sympathetic, well-intentioned practitioners of twentieth-century family life.
