Mrs Bridge (Penguin Modern Classics)

Evan S. Connell was born in Kansas City in 1924. He served in the US navy in the Second World War and lived briefly in Paris before returning to the US, where he wrote and supported himself with odd jobs. His incredibly varied books range from long experimental poems to a best-selling biography of General Custer, but he will be remembered above all for his two masterpieces about middle-class, suburban American life: Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He died in New Mexico in 2013.