The Witches of Eastwick - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

It's the marvelous story of three ambitious witches living in a small New England town in the late 1960s, who find themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub is the scene of some rather bewitching delights.

Book Synopsis

"John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort."--The New York Times Book Review

Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick--and through the even darker fantasies of the town's collective psyche.

"A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have."--Newsday

Review Quotes

"John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort."--The New York Times Book Review

"A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have."--Newsday

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.