Praise for Sisters"Another minimalist masterpiece, a tight knot of a novel filled with intertextual puzzles, pathos, and happy rewards....Tuck is able to pack so much heft into such a small package."—Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe
"National Book Award winning novelist Lily Tuck takes a sly slant on divorce in this marvelous elliptical novel." —Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com, "Ten Books to Read in September"
"Tuck expertly deploys revelations like land mines. In time, it’s clear that the narrator is expert at distracting herself from actions that have her racked with a guilt she’s not ready to acknowledge. She creates smoke screens: references to Václav Havel’s letters, and quotes from erudite novelists from Philip Roth to Mario Vargas Llosa. But she keeps colliding into the matters of loss, fear and betrayal she’s trying to wriggle free from. We know very little about the man she married, and only a little more about her stepchildren, which underscores Tuck’s point: A marriage has as much to do with what we think of ourselves as what we think of the person we married."—Mark Athitakis, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"With her signature clipped and measured prose, National Book Award winner Tuck's new novel is elegant, raw , and powerful...Though compact enough to be read in one sitting, it's also magnificent enough to be reread and renewed."—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review) “In her signature crisp, exacting prose, Tuck's seventh novel haunts the territory of marital jealously with delicacy and finesse... the novel's quiet rooms, fragmented form, sensual descriptions of food, wine, and fabric, and, above all, its dreamy pace combine to lull the reader into a reverie from which the actual plot's sudden climax comes as a rude awakening. Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts.”—Kirkus Reviews "
Her circumscribed narrative cocoons always release carefully shaped butterflies of observation and wisdom. Sisters is another wonderful Tuck prism...With Tuck, you get a smattering of everything snugged into a tight package. Sisters is a novel about marriage, family, sex, jealousy and vanity. Its narrator makes her way through entanglements and digressions as her life moves toward a surprising but fitting outcome. Tuck's cocoon once again yields a butterfly. All nine of her works of fiction will take less than a foot of your bookshelf. Have at 'em!"—Shelf Awareness
Praise for Lily Tuck
“A genius with moments . . . Her ability to capture beauty will remind readers of Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras.”— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tuck packs a small universe and decades of emotional history into each story.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Tuck’s unflinching eye to detail and faithful ear for dialogue bring to life the brutal, the tragic, and the melancholy.” —Boston Globe
“A masterful, insightful, readable writer.”—The Rumpus
“Tuck’s prose is elegant.” — New York Times Book Review
“Tuck’s fundamental focus [is] on the vicissitudes of relationships between men and women—and in this she is a master.”—Shelf Awareness
Praise for The Double Life of Liliane
“Compels the reader to appreciate bare-bones storytelling and minimalist scenes over warts-and-all portraiture and barnstorming set-pieces...After a fashion we stop questioning how much of what we are reading is memoir and how much of it isn’t, and simply surrender to the elegant, limpid prose of this, the most beguiling work of Lily Tuck’s career.”—The Millions
“Enlivening.”—New Yorker
“Intriguing... intricate.”—Entertainment Weekly
“As with Tuck’s other books, the narrative voice here performs a delicate balance between immediacy and remoteness.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Intriguing and intelligent...Tuck simultaneously creates a layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through and questions the possibility of definitively capturing or summing up human lives...a high-wire act...exciting in its sweep, ambition, and conceptual intricacy.”—Boston Globe
"Remarkably seamless... Sebaldian both in its tell-tale use of unsourced, evocative photographs and in its hypnotically smooth flow of recollection... hauntingly lovely.”— Huffington Post
"A mosaic of storytelling that is both poetic and absorbing... Tuck inhabits the spacious realm of the imagination, shifting time zones and historic periods effortlessly, weaving memories and photographs, family stories and facts, as Liliane's mesmerizing portrait emerges.”— NPR.com
2017-06-20
In her signature crisp, exacting prose, Tuck's (The Double Life of Liliane, 2015, etc.) seventh novel haunts the territory of marital jealously with delicacy and finesse.The unnamed narrator of this slim book is a second wife, inheritor of two teenage stepchildren and all the well-thumbed habits of a previous marriage which consumed her husband's youth and most of his passion. What the reader knows about the narrator's husband is a series of small preferences—he is an avid tennis player; he "had good taste and dressed well—he wore bespoke shirts made in England"—from which we are led to infer both his basically callow nature and the narrator's ambivalence toward her marriage. The narrator herself is far more interesting. She possesses a mimetic memory for incidental detail (she can recall outfits, menus, vintages of wine from events years in the past) coupled with a yearning for the kind of sophistication she imagines as wholly natural to the ex-wife our narrator refers to only as she. She is an almost entirely hypothetical creation whose habits, partialities, cultured languor, and equally cultured passion (before her marriage she was a gifted concert pianist) the narrator covets with a tricky blend of curiosity, jealousy, and desire. Indeed, so heady is the narrator's longing for news of the ex-wife's life, so convulsive the way she inserts herself into the shape the ex-wife has left behind, it is hard not to anticipate the story tending toward a climactic confrontation between the two wives after the fashion of a Hollywood psychodrama. Tuck is far too consummate and unusual a stylist to allow for any such bathos; however, the novel's quiet rooms, fragmented form, sensual descriptions of food, wine, and fabric, and, above all, its dreamy pace combine to lull the reader into a reverie from which the actual plot's sudden climax comes as a rude awakening. Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts but ultimately a novel that prioritizes the virtuoso skill of its narration at the cost of a hastily staged conclusion.
