Answered Prayers

"A gift from an unbridled genius. Exciting...irresistible...should be cherished as top-flight work from a master." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. As it follows the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Cote Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly... inspired." -- The New York Times Book Review "A gift from an unbridled genius. Exciting...irresistible...should be cherished as top-flight work from a master." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. As it follows the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Cote Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly... inspired." -- The New York Times Book Review

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1965), which immediately became the centre of a storm of controversy on its publication, Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986), all of which are published by Penguin. Truman Capote died in August 1984.