William Styron's most complex and ambitious novel begins with a young Southerner journeying North in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into Stingo's infatuated yet uneasy involvement with his neighbors: the demonically brilliant Jew, Nathan, and his Polish lover, Sophie, a beautiful woman with a number tattooed on her arm and an unbearable secret in her past. And finally Sophie's Choice leads to an unblinking confrontation with what can only be called pure evil.
Editorial Reviews
"Sophie's Choice is a passionate, courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century," said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. "One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophie's Choice is that, like Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force....Sophie's Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake's nest may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature." --The New York Times Book Review
"Sophie's Choice achieves an almost palpable evocation of its place and time--Poland before and during the war, Brooklyn and Coney Island immediately after." --Geoffrey Wolff
