George and his large, simple-minded friend Lennie are drifters, following wherever work leads them. Arriving in California's Salinas Valley, they get work on a ranch.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own.
In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is the day after Lousy Wednesday, one of those days which is just bad from the start. But Sweet Thursday is sunny and clear, a day when anything can happen...
Each of these delightful interconnected tales is devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects that one particular family has on them all.
Steinbeck's only work of political satire turns the French Revolution on its head, as amateur astronomer Pippin Heristal is drafted in to rule the unruly French.
Ethan Allen Hawley has lost the acquisitive spirit of his wealthy and enterprising forebears, a long line of proud New England sea captains and Pilgrims. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery clerk in a store his family once owned.
Banished to a desert retreat for errant clerics, the Reverend but randy Thomas Marshfield types out his life history and his yearning for the retreat's manager, the mysterious Ms Prynne.
Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach; their flight into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west.
Proving with this, his fifty-first book, that he is still one of our finest, most powerfully imaginative and entertaining writers, John Updike here gives us his unique take on the tale of Hamlet,Prince of Denmark.