Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II.
Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
'I think it is the best-written, best-designed, and most moving novel I have read in many years. Beginning with a tiny incident among ordinary boys, it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself.' - Aubrey Menen
'A masterpiece.' - National Review
'A model of restraint, deeply felt and beautifully written.' - The Observer
'Mr. Knowles has something to say about youth and war that few contemporary novelists have attempted to say and none has said better.' - Warren Miller
