A Weekend in New York: A Novel - Hardcover

Benjamin Markovits grew up mostly in Texas. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a novel. Since then he has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review. He has published seven novels, his most recent novel, You Don’t Have To Live Like This, set in Detroit, was widely praised. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son. He teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

"Intimate, funny and agile enough to capture the ever-shifting sands on which family life is built ... masterfully done."―Daily Mail

"Markovits' elegant, absorbing eighth novel ... He wears his sporting knowledge with a light, limber confidence. He’s terrific on the fine-grained detail of the athlete’s life ... What a fine ear Markovits has for the way people talk ... Incrementally, over the course of the weekend, we’ve grown attuned to the lives of Markovits’s first-world also-rans, thrilled by their series of close-volley dramas like spectators in the stands of an outside court ... It feels momentous, a catalyst for change, and the outcome sends ripples into the future."―Guardian

"A book to be savored ... for its granular evocation of family life ... Hugely enjoyable."―Observer

“Markovits hits winner after winner”―Financial Times

"Markovits is excellent on gradations of failure. He also has the patience and precision to capture the elusive minutiae of our inner lives and interpersonal relationships."―Sunday Times (UK)

"Sophisticated and engrossing ... full of authentically captured emotion and wonderfully acute observation ... the imprint of Saul Bellow is evident [yet] Markovits’s voice feels wholly his own ... This is a subtle, ruminative novel of family life, generational conflict and compromise [and] marks a novelist coming into his own."―Literary Review