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Foreign Affairs
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
Virginia Miner, a 50-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.
Also in London is Vinnie's colleague, Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.
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Review 3 daughters of Eve
- By CA on 04-28-18
By: Elif Shafak
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Mrs Queen Takes the Train
- By: William Kuhn
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn - author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books - Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts.
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Can't believe how much I loved this story
- By analyzethis on 03-10-13
By: William Kuhn
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An Available Man
- A Novel
- By: Hilma Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Fred Sullivan
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Edward Schuyler - a modest and bookish 62-year-old science teacher - is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. The problem is that Edward doesn’t feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching.
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Lovely book, easy read, wonderful characters
- By Molly-o on 02-17-12
By: Hilma Wolitzer
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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Young Hearts Crying
- By: Richard Yates
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship in the 1950s to their divorce in the '70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II, and at first he and his new wife, Lucy, enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates a fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation.
By: Richard Yates
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The Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are 35,000 feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent 40 years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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A bit of a downer
- By Jody Cox on 08-01-18
By: Meg Wolitzer
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Property
- Stories Between Two Novellas
- By: Lionel Shriver
- Narrated by: Lionel Shriver
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A striking new collection of ten short stories and two novellas that explores the idea of property in every meaning of the word, from the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author of the National Book Award finalist So Much for That and the international best seller We Need to Talk About Kevin.
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Painful and drawn out
- By JR on 06-27-18
By: Lionel Shriver
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Mrs. Tim of the Regiment
- By: D. E. Stevenson
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Vivacious, young Hester Christie tries to run her home like clockwork, as would befit the wife of British Army officer, Tim Christie. However hard Mrs Tim strives for seamless living amidst the other army wives, she is always moving flat-out to remember groceries, rule lively children, side-step village gossip and placate her husband with bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade. Left alone for months at a time whilst her husband is with his regiment, Mrs Tim resolves to keep a diary of events large and small in her family life.
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Life as a military wife
- By Jerri C on 03-09-13
By: D. E. Stevenson
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How It All Began
- By: Penelope Lively
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true.
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Wonderful and beautifully written
- By Molly-o on 02-15-12
By: Penelope Lively
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Moonlight over Paris
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Robson
- Narrated by: Jane Copland
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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It's the spring of 1924, and Lady Helena Montagu-Douglas-Parr has just arrived in France. On the mend after a near-fatal illness, she is ready to embrace the restless, heady allure of the City of Lights. Her parents have given her one year to live with her eccentric aunt in Paris, and Helena means to make the most of her time. She's quickly drawn into the world of the Lost Generation and its circle of American expatriates, and, with their encouragement, she finds the courage to pursue her dream of becoming an artist.
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A pleasant trip to 1924 Paris
- By RueRue on 05-09-16
By: Jennifer Robson
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Gold Dust
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Three women linked by their blood, their dreams...and their sins. From Leningrad in the '70s to America and London in the present day, Kimberley Freeman's new novel follows the lives of two sisters, Lena and Natalia, and their cousin, Sofi, as they move away from Russia and all they have known. Despite promising to always take care of each other, a pact to meet every winter is shattered as their lives change and long-held resentments begin to surface. Can that resentment turn to hatred? To murder?
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It's just not the same without Caroline Lee
- By Maria on 12-04-17
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Past Imperfect
- By: Julian Fellowes
- Narrated by: Richard Morant
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, England, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern--his fortune in excess of 500 million and who should inherit it on his death.
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Read Snobs instead
- By cristina on 02-14-13
By: Julian Fellowes
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
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Born in 1917, Tennessee author Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for this exceptional work of literature. The well-to-do Carver family moves to Memphis from Nashville, where they become embroiled in a domestic dispute over the widower patriarch's decision to remarry.
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Not at all interesting
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The second novel by Donna Tartt, best-selling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize), The Little Friend is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence, and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved. So Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright and insufferably determined - sets out to unmask his killer.
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Couldn't put it down
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Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally – and fatally – dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
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good book bad reader
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When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the wilds of academia. He's lost his fellowship position for the fall semester, can find work only in what he considers to be intellectual cesspits--schools that would brand the young history professor as forever unsuitable for the Ivy League--and is one thesis short of a PhD. Rather than doom his career, he takes a temporary job in Los Angeles, a city whose superficial charms signal an adventure.
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Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland, to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials, and its triumphs - through their quarrels, their routines, and their ability to tolerate each other's faults with patience and affection.
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Not at all interesting
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The second novel by Donna Tartt, best-selling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize), The Little Friend is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence, and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved. So Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright and insufferably determined - sets out to unmask his killer.
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Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.
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RARE AND WONDERFUL STORIES!
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Strapped by a chauffeur's wages, Michael Rogers' want of a better life seems out of reach. Especially elusive is a magnificent piece of property in Kingston Bishop - until a chance meeting with a beautiful heiress makes his dreams possible. Marrying her is the first step. Building the perfect home is the next. Unfortunately Michael ignored the local warnings about the deadly curse buried in the tract of land, and living out his dreams may exact a higher price than he ever imagined.
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This book....<br />
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By: Agatha Christie
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The Shipping News
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At 36, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife gets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons - and the unpredictable forces of nature and society - and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
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The Stone Diaries
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Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
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basic americana
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By: Carol Shields, and others
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The Shards
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Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
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Don’t read if you have a weak stomach
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Tinkers
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An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating.
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Annoying and pretentious
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By: Paul Harding
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March
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From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.
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Great book, greatly narrated
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White Teeth
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
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- Unabridged
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
What listeners say about Foreign Affairs
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Lashly
- 02-13-21
A thoroughly enjoyable experience
The wit and humor of this book was a great surprise to me. The characters are beautifully drawn and the story is very satisfying. I found myself laughing out loud at a phrase or description.
Ms. Van Dyck does a masterful job of rendering the people and the style of this prize winning novel.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Forest
- 09-08-13
Clever Title
If you could sum up Foreign Affairs in three words, what would they be?
Characters diverse and interesting
What was one of the most memorable moments of Foreign Affairs?
When one character had been posing as two.
Did the narration match the pace of the story?
Yes
Who was the most memorable character of Foreign Affairs and why?
The actress
Any additional comments?
Yes- I am submitting this review only because it,s important that your narrators pronounce locations, people,s names etc. properly. In the age of the Internet , it is inexcusable, it would take two minutes to find out how the composer Purcell is said and Muskogee as in the turnpike. Very unprofessional and downright lazy!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Margaret
- 03-16-12
Fascinating
Any additional comments?
I don't remember what attracted me to this title, probably the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. But, now I'm reading all of Alison Lurie's novels and it turns out there is one family that connects the books so it's worth the effort to read them in sequence. I wish I'd realized that because Foreign Affairs is somewhere in the middle, though it works as a stand alone novel as well. Beautifully written.
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19 people found this helpful
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- Michael Payne
- 12-15-20
Great discovery
So happy to have discovered this novel. Currently working my way through all of the a Pulitzer novels. Reminds me of Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler with a little mix of Less by Andrew Sean Greer.
The vocal performance by Jennifer Van Dyck was thoughtful to the dialects and felt true to character.
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- kmilesmcleod
- 04-30-24
Entertaining and engaging
Van Dyck brought Foreign Affairs to life, deftly telling Lurie's story of a middle aged educator on a research sabbatical in London. The characters are engaging and the novel has some intriguing surprises, as well as some excellent nuggets of wisdom.
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- Sojourner
- 04-23-17
Just Right
Not what I'd imagined, it had a few curve balls. I enjoyed it, want to read more by this author.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Judith C. Morris
- 09-28-24
British vs American
What a good tale. And I don’t think anyone even pays attention to this book now
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- Lori K.
- 09-16-15
Laura Ashley dress reference brought me back!
Being nearly 50 myself, I've been looking for books that have older female protagonists. I'm curious about how others of that age navigate life. This one did feel a bit outdated, being written in the 80's, but it was a fun listen. I had to laugh when she talked about wearing her flowery Laura Ashley dress! Vinnie, the main character, is a bit of a fuss-budget, but she experiences some growth, in that she starts out far more of a snob than she ends up. I thought it was a good expat book. Being an expat myself, I heard a lot of my own thoughts echoed in the characters here. While there are some who question the book's winning a Pulitzer, saying it was just a romance novel, I think they missed a lot of the insights that were explored, the struggles we experience when our identities are challenged and the ways in which we miss having relationships with people because we are so worried about how hanging out with someone who is different from us will affect the ways in which others see us. It reveals that those assumptions we make about others can be so misguided. There's a lot of affectionate poking fun at pretentiousness, and one can't deny that many of us engage in that behavior. And I know I have my own invisible dog :-) I'm glad I'm not the only one. Come along Fido.
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- Maggie Barkin
- 03-14-21
Lots of fun lots of insights
Loved this! Terrific protagonist who is witty & wicked. Set in modern day London. Love and ambition
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 07-29-20
a unique story of 2 American academics in London
Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie is the story of two American academics living and studying in the UK. Virgina (called Vinnie) is a middle aged single woman who specializes in American and British nursery rhymes. She is an admitted Anglophile and looking forward to six months on the island. Fred is a 28 year old lecturer. Very handsome and recently separated from his wife, he is lonely and depressed. Both find love interests: a big cowboy from Oklahoma for Vinnie and a titled and entitled actress for Fred.
This is the story of struggle. Vinnie wants to hide her lover from her British friends. She is embarrassed by him, but finds her desire growing. And Fred wants more attention from his lover, because he is used to women throwing themselves at him. Both find themselves in sweet, funny, new situations that surprise them and help them grow. Lurie does a good job showing all the complexities of relationships, but this is not a romance novel. It is an exploration of much more: how do we define ourselves, how do we grow and change, and how do we work together with others to have valuable, rewarding relationships.
The ending was unexpected, and for me that is always a good thing. I like books best when they do not go with what is predictable.
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