Stoner

This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is a book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read. 'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it's one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' — Tom Hanks, Time. William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value — of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history — and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life. 'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' — Ian McEwan. 'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' — Nick Hornby. INTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN.