A Separate Peace

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.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

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.

--Simon and Schuster

"A coming-of-age tale set in a New England boarding school, it bears immediate comparison to its better known contemporary _The Catcher in the Rye_ but is an altogether gentler, more quietly brilliant book.... Reading this novel will feel like unearthing a forgotten gem." --The Independent

"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