Love and Friendship

(Paperback)

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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' 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

Reviews

Awesomely good * Sunday Times *
A brilliant and seemingly effortless accomplishment...steady uninterrupted delight * Sunday Telegraph *
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 *
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. -- Helen Simpson
Not for the prim, this is definitely adult education, as well as a bright entertainment * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Bio

Alison Lurie 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 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.