Sophie's Choice

Summary

In postwar Brooklyn, an aspiring young Southern writer befriends his upstairs neighbors, a charismatic Jewish intellectual and his beautiful Polish Catholic lover, whose past as an Auschwitz survivor slowly comes into view. Styron uses the narrator's coming-of-age to frame a meditation on guilt, memory, and the impossibility of fully comprehending atrocity. The novel's lyrical prose and shattering revelations made it one of the most discussed American books of its decade.