- Mothers and sons, Father figures, Fiction, Americans
"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese.
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Character
Grave, spare, earnest and meticulous.
- gravecomic
- sparerichly built
- earnestironic
- rawmeticulous
- unpretentiousprestige
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About the book
- First published
- 2000
- Pages
- 530
- Publisher
- Penguin Random House, Talk Miramax Books, Chatto & Windus
- Editions
- 18
- Language
- Spanish, Polish, English, Russian
- ISBN
- 9780786887002
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 7 have read it and 62 want to.
“My father's father was a Methodist minister.”
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