A Separate Peace by John Knowles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I started reading this book, I asked, “Where have you been all my life?” I love 20th-century literature – its underlying relentless questioning. The absurdity of it all. Salinger, Plath, Eliot, Sartre – to name a few – have always resonated (or perhaps reverberated) in my mind. And then I just stumbled on Knowles while perusing the Classics section of a used book store in Breckenridge, Colorado. Why wasn’t I exposed to this masterpiece in high school, or better yet, college? This novel has been elevated to the short but revered “favorite” list of mine; it’s one of the few that deserves to be reread. I believe it is one of the best that 20th-century literary fiction has to offer.

You can read the jacket if you want a blurb about the plot. I don’t want to spoil one word of it for anyone – and not a word written in this book is out of place.