Ordinary People

One of the foremost literary bestsellers of our time, now in a 50th-anniversary edition featuring a new foreword by psychoanalyst and New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Amy Bloom A Penguin Classic They were a perfect family. Calvin was a successful provider and Beth a fastidious wife. They had two sons, Buck and Conrad, but now they have one. When originally published, Ordinary People introduced an original American voice. It sold more than a million copies and inspired the 1980 Academy Award–winning movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, and Timothy Hutton. Fifty years later, it remains an iconic novel, distinguished by Judith Guest’s ear for dialogue and her unflinching portrait of one family’s reckoning with grief.