Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot – entirely – leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which Mordecai Richler’s fiction is celebrated.


From the Paperback edition.

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“Mordecai Richler has proven beyond all doubt that he ranks with
this century’s best novelists.”
–Edmonton Journal

“Richler possesses a powerful and fecund imagination. . . .”
–Hamilton Spectator

“He is a gifted stylist, with a great ear for parody and comic dialogue…”
–New York Times Book Review

“Richler is a comic writer who sprays his personality on his fiction like a tomcat.”
–The Times (U.K.)


From the Paperback edition.

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