Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice Synopsis

In post-war Brooklyn, three lives are drawn together by love, guilt and an unbearable secret.

In the summer of 1947, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old Southerner, arrives at a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb.

There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Drawn into the centre of their passionate and destructive relationship, Stingo becomes witness, confidant and supplicant as love, jealousy and emotional volatility gather around them.

At the heart of the novel lies Sophie's past: pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and the choice that has shaped the rest of her life.

National Book Award-winning Sophie's Choice is a modern literary classic about survivor's guilt, memory, desire, betrayal and moral consequence. Moving between post-war Brooklyn and the devastation of Europe, William Styron's novel is compassionate, controversial and profoundly searching.

A classic Second World War novel and a work of historical literary fiction, it asks how love, guilt and survival can shape a life after catastrophe.