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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF LILIANE

Lily Tuck

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. Lily Tuck is the author of five novels: I Married You for Happiness; Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up; The Woman Who Walked on Water; Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The News From Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award; and the short story collection The House at Belle Fontaine.
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Published 2015-09-08 by Atlantic Monthly Press

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Ten books to read in September: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150827-ten-books-to-read-in-september Read more...

This odd, beautiful book from Lily Tuck is part memoir, part novel, part poetry, part historical quilt. Read more...

Beautiful and wildly intelligent.

How much of this dizzingly intricate story is true remains unclear—the line between fact, fiction, and embroidered memory is never drawn distinctly. But don’t we all color our pasts in our own unknowable ways? Read more...

This recovery of fragments, for this author, involves a near alchemical process: 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. Read more...

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. Fact, fiction, memoir, novel, prose, poetry— I've never read anything like it. An achingly intelligent work that is, in the words of Liliane's professor Paul de Man, ‘an act of self-restoration.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tuck’s critical acclaim for her National Book Award–winning novel will draw readers to this special, provocative, unusual novel.

Tuck is a genius.

A brilliant blend of fact and fiction. An entirely engrossing and charming novel that draws upon Lily Tuck’s amazing personal history. A triumph of artistry and storytelling.