Foreign Affairs
  • Published: 4 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446425534
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Foreign Affairs

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EBook
4 Jan 2011
Paperback
3 Sep 2020
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This is the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy and tragedy in human relationships, the great Alison Lurie

'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
  • Published: 4 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446425534
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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About the author

Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie, born in 1926, is an American writer and academic. She has published nine novels, including Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize, one collection of short stories and several works of non-fiction. She has also taught literature, folklore, and creative writing at Cornell University since 1969 and is the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lives in upstate New York but during her career has routinely spent time in Florida and London, providing inspiration for her novels. Her career as a writer has seen critical and commercial success, and in both her fiction and academic work she has done much to promote the study of children’s literature. She has three sons and three grandchildren.

Also by Alison Lurie

Truth and Consequences
Boys And Girls Forever
The Last Resort
The War Between the Tates
The Nowhere City
Love and Friendship
See all

Praise for Foreign Affairs

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

Penelope Lively, Sunday Telegraph

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

Rachel Cooke, 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

Christopher Isherwood

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

David Lodge

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

Marilyn Butler, London Review of Books

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

New York Review of Books

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

Sunday Times

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

Paul Bailey, Evening Standard

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

John Fowles, Sunday Times

Warm, clever and funny

Times Literary Supplement