MOODY, Rick. The Ice Storm. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2006.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 278 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, Collector's Notes, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Rick Moody (b. 1961) was born in New York City, attended Brown University and Columbia, and published his debut novel Garden State in 1992. The Ice Storm, his second novel, appeared in 1994 and was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the works that established him as among the best young American novelists of his generation. He has since received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is widely regarded as one of the most formally ambitious novelists of the post-Carver American tradition.

The novel is set over Thanksgiving weekend in November 1973, in the prosperous suburban town of New Canaan, Connecticut. A real ice storm descended on the region that weekend, and Moody uses it as the governing metaphor and literal event around which the novel's crises converge. Two families — the Hoods and the Williamses — are entangled in the specific moral disorder of their time and their class: adultery, adolescent sexual experimentation, the hollow affluence of Nixon-era suburbia, and the pervasive sense that the values that were supposed to sustain these families are not sustaining them at all. Benjamin Hood is sleeping with his neighbour Janey Williams. His wife Elena drifts through the novel in a pharmaceutical fog. Their children — Paul and Wendy — navigate the same landscape of experimentation and disappointment at a teenage scale.

The novel is formally inventive in its use of a close third-person narration that moves between its characters with an anthropological detachment — observing the furniture, the television programmes, the fashions and the pharmaceuticals of the period with the same steady attention it gives to the human beings who inhabit them. The result is a portrait of a culture at the moment of its own disillusionment. Ang Lee's 1997 film adaptation, starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, and Christina Ricci, won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Near fine. Some very minor loss to cover gilt and to edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000567