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Book Summary and Reviews of Sisters by Lily Tuck

Sisters by Lily Tuck

Sisters

by Lily Tuck

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2017, 176 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

With Sisters, Lily Tuck delivers a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession; charting with elegance and insight love in all its phases.

Lily Tuck's critically-lauded, bestselling I Married You for Happiness was hailed by the Boston Globe as "an artfully crafted still life of one couple's marriage." In her singular new novel Sisters, Tuck gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal.

Tuck's unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife - known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Though compact enough to be read in one sitting, it's also magnificent enough to be reread and savored." - Publishers Weekly

"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." - Kirkus

"[Tuck's] latest book, a contemporary novel, is a stunningly compact series of images of a woman's obsession with her husband's former wife, rendered in chapters only a paragraph or at most a page in length." - Booklist

This information about Sisters 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.

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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.

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

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