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From the acclaimed author of Pete and Alice in Maine, comes a standalone and evocative sequel about a mother who, recovering from the trauma of breast cancer and a mastectomy, takes a once-in-a-lifetime trip across France with her two daughters, determined to fully live. There, she finds herself newly awakened by beauty and desire but when the trip takes a turn for the worst, she must decide between a life of pleasure or the deep tethering of family.
Reconciling with her husband after a betrayal and recovering from a yearlong battle with breast cancer, Alice longs for an escape from the trials of everyday life. When the opportunity arises for a once-in-a-lifetime camping trip across France, she packs up her daughters, hoping it's the new start she so desperately needs.
Alice, teenage Sophie, and young Iris begin their odyssey in the French Alps, entering a foreign world they did not know existed: beautiful people, luscious food, and sensual temptations. It's a freeing experience—exploring the countryside, sleeping beneath the stars, reveling in the sights and scents of nature. For the first time since her diagnosis, Alice starts to feel alive, less afraid of dying, and less angry about her husband's affair.
But as the family continues south, traveling through Provence, where they camp on the Gulf of Lions, an area of the Mediterranean known for wild, roaring winds and purple fields of lavender, they start to unravel the yarn that binds them together. By the time they head to the charred Pyrenees, and then back across France to stay in a castle that sits on the confluence of two rivers, Alice worries that the trip might have been a disastrous and reckless mistake.
A beautiful meditation on womanhood, personhood, exploration, survival and sexual awakenings, The Gulf of Lions is a breathtaking and emotionally resonant story that plumbs the eternal question: What, in the end, will keep a family from falling apart?
"Shetterly writes with intimate, journal-like immediacy...Readers who cherished the self-reinvention of Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), the emotional depth of Nina Riggs' The Bright Hour (2017), and the fish-out-of- water perspective of Nicki Chen's When in Vanuatu (2021) will enjoy Shetterly's luminous and life-affirming novel." —Booklist (starred review)
"A late drama involving Sophie seems tacked on for the sake of suspense, and Shetterly's depiction of Alice can feel muddled, as when she attempts to elicit sympathy for Alice without examining the character's tendency to neglect her daughters while out having fun. Shetterly is at her best when describing with affection and pleasure the food, scenery, and cheerfully welcoming residents of France." —Publishers Weekly
"The Gulf of Lions is a joyful, generous portrayal of the love between mothers and children, the exhilaration of discovering new places, gorgeous food, and the many sensual pleasures of France. This novel examines the thorny question of what can we offer others when we are vulnerable ourselves; it arrives at a beautiful answer." —Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming
"An exquisite and indelible portrait of mothers and daughters and the many ways we lose our children. Caitlin Shetterly writes with a thin skin to the world, alert to both its beauty and its ghastliness. I didn't so much read this novel as inhabit it." —Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
This information about The Gulf of Lions 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.
Caitlin Shetterly is the author of Modified, Made for You and Me, and Pete and Alice in Maine. She the editor of the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce. She won the Maine Literary Award for Modified in 2017.
Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, the Boston Globe, Medium, LitHub, Romper, and on Oprah.com, as well as on This American Life, Hidden Brain, Studio 360, Weekend Edition and various other public radio shows. She an editor-at-large for Frenchly, a French arts and culture online news magazine. A Maine native, she graduated with honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state. Caitlin is passionately committed to helping preserve, in every way she can, the peace of wild things. www.caitlinshetterly.com
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