Foreign Affairs

I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once * Sunday Telegraph *
If you’re coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs * Guardian *
Lurie…has quietly but surely established herself as one of this country’s most able and witty novelists * New York Times (1984) *
Perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet
In Foreign Affairs no detail lacks its special piquancy. And none can be savored without leaving you with a mouthful of barbed hooks * New York Times *
She has a capacity in her novels for noting the little vanities and foibles, the revealing mannerisms and contradictions in human social behaviour, which often reminds one of Austen
If you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them * USA Today *
An ingenious, touching book * Newsweek *
A flawless jewel * Philadelphia Inquirer *
Foreign Affairs is probably Alison Lurie’s best novel to date, certainly it is a triumph, and much of its success stems from its accomplished plotting. Lurie has known from the first how to tell a story brilliantly through the consciousness of a woman who in type and circumstance resembles the author herself * London Review of Books *

Alison Lurie has published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina etranger), and The Last Resort. She is also the author of many works of non-fiction, including The Language of Clothes, Don’t Tell the Grownups, Familiar Spirits (a memoir of the poet James Merrill) and two collections of essays and reviews, Reading for Fun and Words and Worlds. She taught literature, folklore and creative writing at Cornell University for many years and is now the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lives in upstate New York but has also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which have provided settings for her fiction. She is married to the writer Edward Hower, and has three sons and three grandchildren.

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