As We Are Now

A Novel

9 February 1993

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

May Sarton (Author)

Description

"I am not mad, only old. . . . I am in a concentration camp for the old."

So begins May Sarton's short, swift blow of a novel, about the powerlessness of the old and the rage it can bring. As We Are Now tells the story of Caroline Spencer, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, mentally strong but physically frail, who has been moved by relatives into a "home." Subjected to subtle humiliations and petty cruelties, sustained for too short a time by the love of another person, she fights back with all she has, and in a powerful climax wins a terrible victory.

Reviews

"May Sarton has never been better than she is in this beautiful, harrowing novel about being old, unwanted, yet refusing to give up. . . . The problems of old age have been detailed by sociologists but only a novel as searching and deeply felt as this one can bring them so close to the bone." — Margaret Manning, Boston Globe

"A brief, strong statement. . . . A convincing record of evil done and good intentions gone astray. . . . A powerful indictment." — Ellen Douglas, New York Times Book Review

Also By: May Sarton View all by author...

  • Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare: A Fable

    May Sarton

    Paperback, 1966

  • The Fur Person

    May Sarton, Jared Williams

    Gift Edition, Paperback, 2015

    One of the most beloved stories ever written about sharing one's life with a cat.
  • May Sarton: Selected Letters, 1955-1995

    May Sarton, Susan Sherman, William Drake, Warren Keith Wright

    Hardback, 2002

    Forty years of correspondence from one of America's most beloved authors, chronicling her life with compelling candor.
  • Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year

    May Sarton

    Paperback, 1999

    "Sarton has been the lighthouse light for millions of women, and despite the dimming of that light, she remains [in this book] the Sarton who wrote Journal of a Solitude."—Library Journal
  • Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley

    May Sarton, Susan Sherman

    Paperback, 1999

    In these extraordinary letters, we see May Sarton in all her complexities and are privy to her tangled relationship with Juliette Huxley, whom May considered her muse and the greatest love of her...

Paperback

9780393309577

140 x 211 mm • 144 pages

£12.99

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