The House at Belle Fontaine Stories

by Tuck, Lily

• ISBN13: 9780802120168
• ISBN10: 0802120164
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-23
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Summary

“Tuck is a genius”—Los Angeles Times Winner of the National Book Award, Lily Tuck follows her critically-acclaimed novel I Married You For Happiness with an elegantly constructed story collection about lives tethered to the past and the unexpected encounters that threaten to unmoor them. The House at Belle Fontaine is at once unexpected and familiar, and wholly memorable for its spare depiction of characters on the brink of transformation. The powerfully intimate stories within The House at Belle Fontaine span the better part of the twentieth century and almost every continent, laying bare apprehensions, passions, secrets, and tragedies that resonate across time and space. In crisp, spare, and penetrating prose, Lily Tuck unveils and suppresses personal truths as her characters navigate exotic locales and immediate emotional territory: an artist learns that her deceased ex-husband had an especially illicit affair seventeen years before his death; a young couple living in Thailand worries about the mental stability of their best friend, a U. S. army captain; on a ship bound for Antarctica, a retired couple strains to hold together their forty-year-old marriage; and a French family flees to Lima in the 1940s with devastating consequences for their daughter’s young nanny. The House at Belle Fontaine reveals the extraordinary in the everyday and the perpetuity of the past. With a deft and expert hand, Tuck excavates the opportunities that arise from loss, and the moments that knock lives into a collision course and an uncertain future.

Author Biography

Lily Tuck is the author of five novels: I Married You for Happiness; Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up; The Woman Who Walked on Water; Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and The News From Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award. She also wrote the biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Else Morante and the story collection Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived.