Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice unfolds a story as absorbing and effective and memorable as any work of fiction in our time. It is written at full tilt, and the mastery of its style and the power of its narrative never falter.

Stingo came to Brooklyn by way of Virginia and the Marine Corps—with a brief sojourn as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. He settled in Yetta Zimmerman's pink-painted rooming house, where the rent was cheap enough for a young man with only a few hundred dollars to devote himself to the novel he wanted to write. Sophie and Nathan lived upstairs, as he agonizingly discovered when their rocking bed threatened to col-lapse the ceiling.

Thus began a strange relationship: Sophie, the Polish Catholic girl whose wrist bore the grim stamp of a concentration camp . . . Nathan, her lover, the charismatic Jewish intellectual . . . and the narrator Stingo, the sex-starved "South'n" boy who was instantly captivated by Sophie's vulnerable blond beauty.