Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Double Life of Liliane by Lily Tuck

The Double Life of Liliane by Lily Tuck

The Double Life of Liliane

by Lily Tuck

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Sep 2015, 256 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

Lily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date, and, significantly too, her most autobiographical work.

As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents.

What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, and family in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Told with Tuck's inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes...that quicken the heart...In Tuck's prose - ... lively, dizzy, happy - one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words." - Publishers Weekly

"Starred Review. Special, provocative, unusual." - Booklist

"Beautiful and wildly intelligent." - Margot Livesey

"With fierce elegance, Lily Tuck boldly dismantles genre boundaries while weaving a seamless narrative from the fragments of her early life. Tuck crosses her physical terrain with candor and psychological acuity...An achingly intelligent work that is, in the words of Liliane's professor Paul de Man, 'an act of self-restoration.'" - Jamie Quatro

"A triumph of artistry and storytelling. An entirely engrossing novel that draws upon Lily Tuck's amazing personal history. A brilliant blend of fact and fiction."—Diane Johnson

This information about The Double Life of Liliane was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Lily Tuck Author Biography

Born in Paris, Lily Tuck is the author of Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991); The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996); Siam or the Woman Who Shot a Man: A Novel (1999); The News From Paraguay (2004), winner of the 2004 National Book Award; and I Married You For Happiness (2011). She is also the author of a book of short stories entitled Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived (2002) and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Fiction, and the Antioch Review. She divides her time between Maine and New York City and has lived in Thailand, Uruguay and Peru.

Author Interview

Other books by Lily Tuck at BookBrowse
  • The News from Paraguay jacket

6 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.