The Nowhere City

A book that will stay with you. A fascinating mixture of first-rate story-telling, humour and exact psychological insight.

I’m mad about Lurie… I have a thing for over-educated adulterers in fiction

I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to them, lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, their witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Lurie shows some really fine ironic humor… An incisive and very witty novel

Perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet

A very witty, assured, sustained creation of both people and place

Lurie treats Los Angeles as worth looking at closely, not just as a backcloth...often very funny, always easily readable

Absorbing new cautionary tale...intelligent and entertaining

Alison Lurie published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), and The Last Resort. She was 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 was the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lived in upstate New York but also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which provided settings for her fiction. She married the writer Edward Hower, and had three sons and three grandchildren. Alison Lurie died in 2020.

'Marvellous entertainment' Sunday Times 
 
Just married and newly arrived in Los Angeles are Paul and Katherine Cattleman. Paul responds immediately to the sunny, sprawling cosmopolitan city but to Katherine the main impression is of dirt and smog. Paul explores his surroundings and discovers Ceci, a girl who could be the incarnation of the city's uninhibited ways, while Katherine meets Iz a psychiatrist who recognises her unhappiness and sets out to help her. Under the bright west coast sun, the city begins to affect the couple in separate, subtle but significant ways, shining new light on their marriage with moving, funny and unexpected consequences.

Love and Friendship

The stunning debut by Pulitzer Prize-winner, Alison Lurie: a stylish, affecting and compelling novel about the conflict between desire and responsibility.

A brilliant and seemingly effortless accomplishment...steady uninterrupted delight

Lurie is and really is, different. She writes with great elegance, as frostily clear as the climate she describes; and with sharp intelligence piercing through every sentence. She is very funny as well

Not for the prim, this is definitely adult education, as well as a bright entertainment

Alison Lurie published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), and The Last Resort. She was also the author of many works of non-fiction, including The Language of Clothes, Don't Tell the Grownups, Familiar Spirits, 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 was the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lived in upstate New York but also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which provided settings for her fiction. She married the writer Edward Hower, and had three sons and three grandchildren. Alison Lurie died in 2020.

'A brilliant and seemingly effortless accomplishment...steady uninterrupted delight' Sunday Telegraph 
 
Faculty wife Emily Stockwell Turner is beautiful, rich, and principled. However, five years in a marriage devoid of passion is enough to propel Emmy, despite her principles, into an affair with a silver-tongued self-confessed libertine. Her husband, a dull, hard-working lecturer, suspecting everyone but the right man, sends himself half mad with jealousy. The shocking, unforeseen consequences of their affair shatter Emmy's most cherished delusions about friendship, romance, and the ties that bind. 
 
'Lurie is and really is, different. She writes with great elegance, as frostily clear as the climate she describes; and with sharp intelligence piercing through every sentence. She is very funny as well' Observer

The Last Resort

A tragi-comedy of love and mortality set in tropical Key West, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alison Lurie

The Last Resort, like all of Lurie's novels, concerns men and women looking for the perfect partner... If there's one thing Lurie does brilliantly, it is to describe the swift shifts that occur in emotional temperature whenever passion's involved....as funny, wicked and smart as anything she has ever written

The Last Resort retains all [Lurie's] compulsive readability. Its prose is crisp with astringent acumen and witty alertness

This is a charming, sunny book that seems infused with all the warmth of its setting… It is full of sparkish – indeed Muriel Sparkish – observations and gently subversive wit... Lurie beautifully handles…the ecstatic liberation of lesbian love

Lurie has written The Last Resort with all the style and penetrating wit that we have come to expect from this Pulitzer prize-winning author who often draws comparison with Jane Austen. The novel is a subtle comedy of manners which explores the gap between the things that people say in their social relationships, and what they really mean... Any reader looking for a message in this congenial, intelligent novel, can conclude that while age may not bring wisdom, it should restore the precious habit, lost in childhood, of living in and for the "bright, full present"

Sparely, exquisitely written...touching, funny, and exuberant

Alison Lurie's tragi-comedy of love and mortality is set in tropical Key West where anything goes, and ending up can mean starting again. This is entertainment of the very classiest kind

The world’s most enjoyable author

Perfect timing for these smart re-issues of Alison Lurie's novels, which I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to them, lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, their witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, the famous naturalist Wilkie Walker. But this year, as winter comes on, Wilkie seems distant and depressed. In desperation Jenny persuades him to visit Key West, but the sun and tropical scenery do nothing to cheer him up. As he grows even stranger, Jenny becomes involved with some intriguing local characters including Gerry, an ex-beatnik poet, and Lee, the dramatically attractive manager of a women-only guest house. 
 
Wife, secretary, confidante, housekeeper - might Jenny at last break free from her role as Wilkie's support act? 
 
WITH A NEW PREFACE FROM ALISON LURIE 
 
'Full of sparkish - indeed Muriel Sparkish - observations and gently subversive wit... Lurie beautifully handles the ecstatic liberation of lesbian love' Independent

Foreign Affairs

This is the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy and tragedy in human relationships, the great Alison Lurie

I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once

If you’re coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs

Lurie...has quietly but surely established herself as one of this country's most able and witty novelists

In Foreign Affairs no detail lacks its special piquancy. And none can be savored without leaving you with a mouthful of barbed hooks

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

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

The first chapter is one of the most captivating in any recent novel I have read

Lurie weaves a characteristically sharp-eyed, deftly ironic comedy of cultural collisions and collusions that rightly won her comparisons to Henry James and Edith Wharton

I am convinced that Alison Lurie's fiction will long outlast that of many currently more fashionable names. There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy over the years. Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton

A brilliant novel - her best I think. The book is a triumph, and not simply of style...Foreign Affairs is witty, acerbic, and sometimes fiendishly clever

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 étranger), 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.

'If you're coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs' Guardian 
 
Vinnie Miner is an American professor of children's literature on her way to London for six months of research. Settling into her aeroplane seat she finds herself accosted by Chuck, a brash engineer wearing cowboy boots. She never imagines she'll see him again. But wet, windy London turns out to be the setting for fresh beginnings, and for Vinnie, a place to take up space, breathe the air, and to refuse to become a minor character in one's own life. 
 
Foreign Affairs is a comic, heart-wrenching masterpiece of unexpected romance. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AMANDA CRAIG

The War Between the Tates

With equal measures of empathy and humour, this is the story of a family breakdown against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, second wave feminism, a widening generation gap, and the turbulence of a changing world.

Put together with such skill the effect is something glorious in its entirety and flawless under the closest scrutiny; like a fine piece of needlework

Her humour is a delight and she writes with an almost unholy relish

Lurie miraculously seems to understand men as well as she understands women... she constructs her American academic backdrops with the craftsmanlike skill; she evinces rare wisdom, wit, and compassion; and she writes like an angel

Brian and Erica Tate appear to have every advantage in life: academic careers, two children, nice friends and money. But when Brian begins an affair with one of his students the disintegration of their lives is swift and shocking. Things spiral when a protest against a sexist professor at the university ramps up and Brian, hopelessly compromised by split loyalties, gets caught up in the action. 
 
Can the Tates marriage survive? Lurie skewers both sides in this brilliant campus satire of 1960s feminism, parenthood, infidelity and academic pomposity. 
 
'Her humour is a delight and she writes with an almost unholy relish' Irish Times

Alison Lurie

I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Mordant and entertaining, and wonderfully expansive about a time, a place, and the corrosive effect of selfishness

Hours of bitter-sweet, highly intelligent fun

An enjoyably spiky minuet of human selfishness

Sly and funny. A deeply pleasurable page-turner

It is Lurie, not Updike whom people will one day read to discover what our life and times were really like. Dazzling intelligent, witty, perceptive and engaging, she is not to be missed

Lurie is the reigning queen of a certain kind of academic comedy... Truth &amp; Consequences is a deeply pleasurable page-turner

Lurie's entertaining novel charts these symmetrical relationships with subtlety and compassion, and thoughtfully examines the balance of power between those who give and require care

Lurie expertly maps the downward marital slope: the slow falling out of love, the undignified transformations of middle age, the interplay of eros and hypochondria... The author's satirical gifts are undiminished

A story of modern love that will have readers laughing and sighing with recognition... A wry, insightful, thoroughly enjoyable tale about how men and women choose their demons and their lovers, and the sacrifices they're willing to make for both

Delightful... Her characters are, as always, wonderfully imperfect

'Delightful... Her characters are, as always, wonderfully imperfect' New York Review of Books 
 
Alan has changed because he's injured his back. Pain has altered his appearance and made him glum, demanding and resentful. His wife Jane has to do everything for him - fetching, carrying, shopping, cooking, even dressing and undressing him. Sometimes she longs for escape. 
 
Delia is a writer and researcher specialising in fairy tales - she is, in her own estimation, a 'Great Artist'. Her husband, Henry, manages her every need making certain Delia gets everything she desires including spectacular doses of adulation. 
 
Can Delia coax Alan out of his grumpiness? Can Henry stop Jane feeling guilty? Can the two couples break out of their fixed roles? 
 
'I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational' Helen Simpson

Alison Lurie

Praise for Truth and Consequences

I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Mordant and entertaining, and wonderfully expansive about a time, a place, and the corrosive effect of selfishness

Hours of bitter-sweet, highly intelligent fun

I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Mordant and entertaining, and wonderfully expansive about a time, a place, and the corrosive effect of selfishness

Hours of bitter-sweet, highly intelligent fun

I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational.

Mordant and entertaining, and wonderfully expansive about a time, a place, and the corrosive effect of selfishness

Hours of bitter-sweet, highly intelligent fun

Books by Alison Lurie

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