
It is Charity who starts the friendship and who then dictates much of what ensues. At its centre are two couples: the Morgans, Larry and his angelic wife Sally and the Langs, the weak but charming Sid, and the vibrant and impossibly bossy Charity. The story, as related by the aged Larry Morgan, is one of marriage and of friendship.

A novel based on character that has immense narrative power.

It's a miraculous book, written with the wisdom of age but without seeming old. He was 62 when, in 1971, he won the Pulitzer for Angle of Repose: he was 78 when Crossing to Safety, his last novel before his death, came out. Wallace Stegner, who also wrote short stories, essays, biographies and histories, published his first novel in 1937.

Not only a book of a lifetime, Crossing to Safety is a book that comes at the end of a long lifetime of writing.
