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A Novel
by Vendela Vida
With the crystalline voice, mordant humor, and depth of feeling for which her work has been so celebrated, Vendela Vida has crafted another unforgettable heroine in a beautiful and mysterious landscape.
Yvonne, recently widowed and the mother of grown twins, returns to Datça, the coastal village in Turkey where she and her husband honeymooned 24 years ago. She hopes to immerse herself in the warm sand and sea, and in memories of a better time in her life. But her plans are quickly complicated. Her Turkish landlord and his bold and intriguing wife have a curious marital agreement and are constant visitors to the home. And rather than being comforted by her memories, they begin to trouble her.
Overwhelmed by her past and her environment, Yvonne clings to her newfound friendship with Ahmet, a young Turkish boy who sells shells at the local beach. With the boy as her guide, Yvonne gains new insight into her own grown children and begins to enjoy the shimmering sea and the relaxed pace of the Turkish coast. But a terrible accident throws her life into chaos, and her own sense of self into turmoil.
"Starred Review. Vida shows she’s supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person ... clear, simple prose ... An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.” - Kirkus Reviews
“Vendela Vida has written a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman’s voyage to self-discovery as she travels alone in Turkey. Though the aura of dread mounts, as in one of Paul Bowles' eerie and unnerving works of fiction, there are surprising revelations here, and an utterly unpredictable ending." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Vendela Vida's The Lovers is a spare and haunting meditation on how travel can bring us full circle back to the place from which we should have started. I read it over two days and dreamed about it the second night." - Francine Prose, author of Goldengrove
Vendela Vida writes with elegance and economy. In this engrossing novel, she has managed to combine a stingingly acute portrait of grief, a moving meditation on love (both filial and romantic) and a page-turning adventure. - Zoe Heller, author of The Believers
"Like a good poem, the story's meaning is ambiguous, and as interesting for what it is as for what it is not. Long after its surprising last line, the reader is left to ponder the real meanings of Yvonne's troubled journey into self-knowledge." - Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness
This information about The Lovers 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.
Vendela Vida is the author of the critically acclaimed novels And Now You Can Go, Girls on the Verge and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. A founding coeditor of The Believer magazine, she lives with her husband and daughter in northern California.
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