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Published Sep 2015
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Lily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date, and, significantly too, her most autobiographical work.
As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents.
What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, and family in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Told with Tuck's inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.
"Starred Review. Playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes...that quicken the heart...In Tuck's prose - ... lively, dizzy, happy - one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Special, provocative, unusual." - Booklist
"Beautiful and wildly intelligent." - Margot Livesey
"With fierce elegance, Lily Tuck boldly dismantles genre boundaries while weaving a seamless narrative from the fragments of her early life. Tuck crosses her physical terrain with candor and psychological acuity...An achingly intelligent work that is, in the words of Liliane's professor Paul de Man, 'an act of self-restoration.'" - Jamie Quatro
"A triumph of artistry and storytelling. An entirely engrossing novel that draws upon Lily Tuck's amazing personal history. A brilliant blend of fact and fiction."—Diane Johnson
This information about The Double Life of Liliane was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Paris, Lily Tuck is the author of Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991); The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996); Siam or the Woman Who Shot a Man: A Novel (1999); The News From Paraguay (2004), winner of the 2004 National Book Award; and I Married You For Happiness (2011). She is also the author of a book of short stories entitled Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived (2002) and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Fiction, and the Antioch Review. She divides her time between Maine and New York City and has lived in Thailand, Uruguay and Peru.
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