Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

Book Overview

Meet the tourists, former classmates at Yale who, seven years later, must confront the people they've become while forging lives in Manhattan. David, a hedge fund wunderkind who forfeited idealism for wealth, hopes that a more fulfilling life lies ahead in the suburbs. His wife, the beautiful Samona, to whom David returns home nightly with nothing left for her, wonders whether her marriage is stripping away her best years. Ethan, a successful furniture...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743290968
• ISBN13: 9780743290968
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Incredible first novel

Great intertwined summer read with many suprises for the reader. Interesting acknowledgement of self-love throughout the book. It is very thought provoking and left me wondering if the narrator may have been the author or the "villian". Very autobiographical feel to it

the opinion of a 20-something reader

From the standpoint of someone in the book's target demographic, I found the various storylines to be a relevant, at times bitingly honest, social commentary on contemporary relationships. Hobbs observes each character with an eye towards society-at-large and does it in such an under-the-radar way that the book is finished before we even know we have been part of the examination. I think the true value of the book is in various interactions and subsequent relationships between each of the characters and what each of those observations say about us as a society.

Waiting for more from Hobbs

The characters in The Tourists, despite their questionable motivations and integrity, are well developed. I realized early in the book I was distancing myself as much from unnamed narrator as he was from the reader. I thought by leaving him nameless was just one interesting method Hobbs used to richen the reading experience. His anonymity is in stark contrast to the other characters who reach for notoriety and fame. I think this contrast creates an interesting juxtaposition. I look forward to more of his characters in the future....

The Tourists Take New York

Jeff Hobbs' The Tourists is a fabulous page-turner. I was initially skeptical as the opening reads like a coming-of-age novel, but Hobbs' writing skills are tremendous and have propelled him well beyond that narrow genre. The characters are largely unsympathetic and the reader is left alone to interpret their interactions and to decide what - if any - resolution occurs. This created - for me- a fascinating love-hate relationship with the characters and made the book impossible to put down. Additionally, the parallels between college sports and fraternities and the business world were extremely well-drawn and true to my experience in the industry - it is true that the same jocks who were successful at Ivy League schools go on to become powerful in business. Hobbs manages to weave this theme into the story and to create a fiction that is painful because of its truths. I give this 5 stars and can't wait for more from Mr. Hobbs!

Touring Life, Love, and Sexuality

In the bookstore this cover could, but should not, be mistaken for a chick-lit-esque novel on the complications of big city romance. It is much more thoughtful than that, and dares to reveal not only the duality of human existence, but also the darker corners of sexuality. It was engaging, well-paced, modern, and reflective. As a reader I felt myself pendeling between much in the book: loathing and compassion for the characters, bleakness and color of scene-setting, lust and betrayal, fantasy and reality, stupor and sobriety, all of which I presume to be the intent of the author. There was something genius about the fact that these characters all lived in NYC, but continued to exist in a universe that consisted of only a handful of residents. For me the strengths of the book were the character development and this new author's surpising skill to write both internal observation and strong dialogue. The weakness perhaps the feeling of wanting to shake the narrator into defining himself in a way other than background to the lives of others. Would have appreciated a bigger ending. I loved Jeff Hobb's writing style, especially such modern and unique cues as the brilliant use of run-on sentence for effect, and dialogue tags like "..." (this was me). I look forward to Jeff's next book as I'll definitely be buying that one too.