Greed

Charles Tallack: born 1924, died 2010. A long life. And at its heart an unanswered question.

Greed is a story made of stories. It is about the ways stories—love stories, comic stories, heartbreakers—can make a mess of life and leave us still hungry for more.

Tallack’s stories are of the women who gave him existence in every sense. His mother, pregnant at nineteen, widowed twice before Tallack turns two. Tallack’s wife, Marie, spirited, ambitious, wised up. Tallack’s lifelong comrade in arms, Cynthia Hipsley, whose lasting mark on Tallack is a persisting sense of time suspended. Tallack’s granddaughters, Abbie and Eileen, different from one another as two sisters can be.

Beautifully written, rich in its emotional authenticity and historical texture, Greed has evoked comparison to Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and William Maxwell’s classic So Long, See You Tomorrow.