DIDION, Joan (illus. Oscar Liebman). A Book of Common Prayer. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2002.

8vo. Full red-brown leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 269 pp. Illustrated by Oscar Liebman throughout. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Limited to 1,200 numbered copies. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Bookplate adhered to front pastedown. Certificate of Authenticity and publisher's edition notes not present with this copy. Originally published New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was born in Sacramento, graduated from Berkeley in 1956, and went directly to work for Vogue — an apprenticeship in the precision of surfaces that shaped everything she subsequently wrote. She is among the most distinctive prose stylists in twentieth-century American letters: a writer whose sentences are constructed with the calculated fragmentation of someone who knows that coherence is the first thing to go in a crisis, and whose journalism and fiction alike attend to the precise texture of cultural anxiety, political violence, and personal dissolution. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction; Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) are among the essential works of American literary journalism. She died in December 2021, making signed copies of her work posthumous.

A Book of Common Prayer, published in 1977, is her second novel and the one most fully in command of her particular method. It is set in Boca Grande, a fictional Central American republic of grinding instability and moral vacancy, and narrated by Grace Strasser-Mendana — a woman dying of cancer who controls much of the country's wealth and knows, she believes, most of its secrets. Into this world comes Charlotte Douglas, an American woman of remarkable and fatal innocence, who has arrived in Boca Grande looking for her fugitive daughter and who cannot apprehend the nature of the place she has come to. Charlotte is, as Grace observes, "immaculate of history, innocent of politics" — and the novel is the account of what that innocence costs her.

Didion has described the novel as being about "the ways in which we deceive ourselves" — the mechanisms by which people construct narratives of their own lives that cannot survive contact with the world they actually inhabit. Charlotte's narrative, as mediated through Grace's cold and grieving intelligence, is a study in the specific American form of that self-deception: the belief that one can arrive anywhere, innocent and well-intentioned, and find the world responsive to one's needs. Joyce Carol Oates described Didion in the New York Times Book Review as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice."

Near fine. Some very slight loss to gilt at upper front cover; otherwise fine throughout. Certificate of Authenticity and publisher's edition notes not present with this copy.

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Catalogue Number: HH000566