Description

‘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

Publisher Review

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 *