Best Seller
Paperback
$18.00
Available on Nov 03, 2026 | 256 Pages
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.
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.
Author
Judith Guest
Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, which was made into the Academy Award-winning 1980 film of the same name. Her other novels are Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill), Errands, and The Tarnished Eye. Guest lives with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Harrisville, Michigan.
Learn More about Judith Guest