The Confessions of Max Tivoli

From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greer's extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli, told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards.

A Today Show Book Club Pick

We are each the love of someone's life.

So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a nisse, a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child.

The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love.

Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a monster, a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 02/01/2005
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780312423810

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 6.2
Point Value: 14
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 78682 / Confessions of Max Tivoli


Review Citation(s):
Ingram Advance 02/01/2005 pg. 49 - Best Of The Best/Highly Recommended
New York Times 02/20/2005 pg. 26

About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of several works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a Best Book of the Year by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry Award for Short Fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco.