Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was typed out on the Adler, with a blotchy blue carbon copy underneath. Beth stared at this carbon copy. She thought, Jean is the smart top-copy of a person now, and I'm the carbon, messed up and fragile and half invisible. But she also understood that no book quite like this had ever been written by a twenty-year-old girl. The pages crackled with radioactive heat. Readers could be contaminated in their thousands – or in their millions.

Beth now remembered that she knew nobody in the publishing world. She'd had no idea it was a 'world', exactly. She'd imagined there were just writers and printers and the people who paid them doing some slow gavotte together, which nobody else ever saw. All she could do was buy the Writers' and Artists' Year Book from Smith's, choose an agent from its pages who promised 'international representation' and send off the book.


Rosalita sometimes says how sad it is that most of what she and Beth talk about in the winter afternoons is concerned with endings of one kind or another. But she likes the next bit of Beth's story. What happened next seemed to promise new happiness: Beth was taken on by an agent.

'The agent was called Beatrice,' Beth tells her. 'After she'd read the book, she invited me round to her office in Canonbury Square. There was a bottle of champagne waiting. She said, "I can sell this novel in forty countries."'

'Forty countries!' gasps Rosalita. 'In Portugal, we probably couldn't name more than half of those.'

'Well,' says Beth, 'I probably couldn't either. I never knew Panama was a country, I thought it was a canal. And I've forgotten the list of all the places where the book was sold. All I know is that money started to come to me – so much money I thought I would drown in it.'

'And then you buy the red car?' asks Rosalita.

'No. Not that car. That was a gift, which came later. I bought another car, a Maserati. But a car didn't seem much to own, so I bought a house in Kensington and then I drove to France with Beatrice and I bought a second house in St-Tropez.'

'Were you happy?' asks Rosalita.
'No. I was famous. I made the cover of Paris Match and Time magazine. I perfected the way I looked. Not like I look now, Rosalita. It was my moment of being beautiful. I got letters from all over the world from people wanting to go to bed with me. I probably could have slept with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni, if I'd tried.'

'Ah, Mastroianni. What a god!'

'Yes, he was, I suppose,' says Beth. 'But I never met him.' As if to affirm the disappointment of not meeting Mastroianni, the lights in the flat go out suddenly and the afternoon dark presses in. Rosalita goes hunting for candles, but can't find any, so she lights the gas fire and by its scented blue light changes the subject to ask Beth what her mother and father thought about the book.

'Oh,' says Beth. 'Well, I remember the way they looked at me. Sorrow and pity. No pride. They told me I'd sold my soul.'

'And what did you say?'

'I said no, I gave my soul away for nothing. Thaddeus still has it. He keeps it somewhere, in a drawer, with old restaurant bills and crumbs of stale tobacco and discarded Polaroids that have faded to the palest eau-de-Nil green.'

Rosalita doesn't know what to say to this. Perhaps she doesn't understand it? Her comprehension of English is known to falter now and then. The gas fire flickers and pops. Rosalita gets up and puts on her coat and before leaving places a kiss on Beth's unwashed hair.


After The American Lover, there would need to be another book, a follow-up, so Beatrice said. Did Beth want the world to think she was a one-book wonder?

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.