Vous voulez voir cette page en fran�ais ? Cliquez ici.

31 used & new from CDN$ 0.01

See All Buying Options

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

Share your own customer images

Search inside another edition of this book

Eleanor Rigby (Hardcover)

by Douglas Coupland (Author)

4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.

6 new from CDN$ 18.95 24 used from CDN$ 0.01 1 collectible from CDN$ 54.22

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Hey Nostradamus!

by Douglas Coupland

4.3 out of 5 stars (12) CDN$ 15.33

Life After God

by Douglas Coupland

4.4 out of 5 stars (59) CDN$ 11.68

All Families are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

3.6 out of 5 stars (25) CDN$ 15.33

Shampoo Planet

by Douglas Coupland

3.7 out of 5 stars (59) CDN$ 14.59

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

by Douglas Coupland

3.8 out of 5 stars (99) CDN$ 13.64

› Explore similar items

Product Details

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (January 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1582345236
ISBN-13: 978-1582345239
Product Dimensions: 21 x 14.8 x 2.6 cm
Shipping Weight: 422 g

Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #266,730 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#31 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( C ) > Coupland, Douglas

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

Review

�One of the first great novels of the new century.� (Kirkus (starred) )

�Poignant, funny, intrepidly offbeat�[A] clever, inspired, brilliantly strange tale.� (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

�Liz is such a believably, sympathetic narrator that you�re gripped all the way.� (Marie Claire magazine )

�Coupland can still write a sparkling sentence and a mean epigram.� (Entertainment Weekly )

�A mystical meditation on loneliness and solitude.� (New York Post )

�[A] heartwarming novel�Coupland has a canny take on everything, and his one-liners zing.� (People magazine )

�Coupland has crafted a formidable pop style that hooks up dead-on cultural anthropology with surprising reserves of emotion.� (Village Voice )

This tale�is told with abundant wit and a deceptive simplicity.� (Boston Globe )

�This anthology offers a fresh perspective.� (Publishers Weekly )

�Funny, sometimes even profound, these authors offer an amusing road map to that strange and winding road from bachelorhood to marriage.� (Tampa Tribune )

�Men, those freedom-loving buggers, want romance after all.� (The Denver Post )

� Eleanor Rigby remains as thoughtful and melancholy as the Beatles song its title evokes.� (The Boston Herald )

�Liz�s musings on loneliness have a welcome pungency.� (The New York Times )

�Marvelous�This book is funny and strange, but it�s also moving and bittersweet.� (The Los Angeles Times )

�Ever the risk-taker, [Coupland] enters the blandly settled consciousness of a fat, unloved, 50-ish woman with no friends and no life, and makes us believe in her.� (Hartford Courant (CT) )

�Coupland�s eighth novel�is chock full of the good-natured goofiness we�ve come to love.� (The News-Press )

�Coupland�s writing is a fast river of fresh perceptions and comic dialogue.� (Houston Chronicle )

�Eleanor Rigby is heartfelt and a lightning-quick read, well worth the time and a must for any Coupland fan or any newcomer.� (Buffalo News (New York) )

�Strange and inventive.� (USA Today )

Product Description

A riveting, witty, and profound story of loneliness and connection from internationally bestselling author Douglas Coupland.

The 1997 night that Hale-Bopp streaks across the skies over Vancouver, Liz Dunn has nothing in her life but impending oral surgery and an armful of schmaltzy video rentals to get her through her solitary convalescence in her sterile condo. She's overweight, crabby, and plain, but behind her eyes lurk whole universes that she's never had the opportunity to express. Just as Liz makes a quiet decision to seek peace in her life rather than certainty, along comes another comet, in the form of a young man admitted to the local hospital with her name and number inscribed on his Medic Alert bracelet: In case of emergency, contact Liz Dunn.

A charming lost soul and a strange visionary, Jeremy upends Liz's quiet existence, triggering a chain of events that take her to the other side of the world and back, endangering her life just as a real chance at happiness finally seems within reach. By turns funny and heartbreaking, Eleanor Rigby is a fast-paced read and a haunting exploration of the ways in which loneliness affects us all.

See all Product Description

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

(What's this?)

Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)

apple(1)

finding yourself(1)

geek(1)

microsoft(1)

nerd(1)

silicon valley(1)

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?

	39% buy the item featured on this page: Eleanor Rigby 4.7 out of 5 stars (3)
	18% buy Generation A 4.8 out of 5 stars (4) CDN$ 20.76
	16% buy Hey Nostradamus! 4.3 out of 5 stars (12) CDN$ 15.33
	16% buy Life After God 4.4 out of 5 stars (59) CDN$ 11.68

Explore similar items

Customer Reviews

3 Reviews

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most helpful customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars my favourite since life after god!, Jul 20 2005

By	hillaryloves - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eleanor Rigby (Hardcover)

Something I found in Eleanor Rigby that I missed in some of his earlier works is hope.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

5.0 out of 5 stars Kinda makes you stop and think, May 24 2005

By	NorthVan Dave (North Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Eleanor Rigby (Hardcover)

Douglas Coupland has done a great job of capturing the feelings and emotions that all of us have experienced in our lifetimes, althoug the primary feeling which the author focuses on is that of loneliness. His description of the how the protagonist feels is written in such a manner that everyone, regardless of their background, will be able to relatee to.

I also enjoyed how Coupland was able to write about the interplay between family members. In reading the interactions between the main character and her mother, sister, and brother, each conversation felt as though it could actually have taken place. These are not phoney characters, designed simply to advance the plot. Rather they come across as real people with feelings and emotions.

In the words of Siskel and Ebert, I give this novel two thumbs up.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

4.0 out of 5 stars all the lonely people, Feb 5 2005

By	E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Eleanor Rigby (Paperback)

The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" is a melancholy song about lonely people, isolated in the world. The same could be said of Douglas Coupland's writing -- particularly this book, "Eleanor Rigby," a look at mortality and loneliness. It's not his finest or most insightful, but it has wit and heart.

Middle-aged Liz Dunn is crabby, lonely and fat. After dental surgery, she seals herself in her apartment with a stack of sad movies, until she receives a shocking phone call. A young man ODed and ended up in the hospital -- and he claims to her son, the result of a drunken tryst when she was only a teenager in Rome. For the first time, Liz finds herself actually having to be a mom.

As if that weren't enough of a shock, Jeremy is also dying of multiple schlerosis. But he is also chipper and upbeat, unwilling to let his impending death get him down. The mother and son start to get to know each other, with the bittersweet knowledge that whatever bond they form is temporary. But Jeremy's mere presence is enough to change Liz forever.

Yeah, it sounds like a Lifetime tear-jerker. Fortunately, Douglas Coupland is able to yank the seemingly ordinary plot up by its acid-wit shoestrings. He isn't exactly known for his chipper outlook on life, but there's a certain poignant optimism to this novel. Its most memorable line is "Death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was," challenging the bleak life that Liz is living, and defining the too-short life her son had.

At times, Coupland seems a bit too flip about Jeremy's M.S. Maybe that humor keeps the book from becoming morbid. The tone is also intimate than his prior books, since it focuses mainly on two people. His smooth, stripped-down writing style is intact, along with dry witticisms. But Coupland's acerbic style hides a surprisingly sweet center.

Liz is quite possibly the funniest lonely person in modern literature -- she takes her private misery and constantly makes fun of it, but not enough to make us take her lightly. And Jeremy is a character who easily could have been insufferable, if Coupland hadn't made him so earnest.

Coupland's ninth novel is an ode to all the lonely people -- especially those who don't necessarily have to be lonely. "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?/All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 3 customer reviews...