Andrea Lee

"Gorgeously evocative, Red Island House follows two decades in the life of Shay, an African-American professor whose husband Senna, a brash and wealthy Italian businessman, builds her a dream house in Madagascar"--

A Novel

Red Island House

From the acclaimed author of Red Island House, Andrea Lee’s brilliant, outrageous collection of short stories confronts identity, desire, colliding cultures, and self-discovery. In vivid prose infused with wicked irony, award-winning author Andrea Lee takes us on a dazzling international journey into the hearts and minds of a number of extraordinary women—intelligent, cosmopolitan, and fiercely independent—who, with wit and style, grapple with questions of identity in an increasingly connected world where everyone has become, in some way, a foreigner. In “The Birthday Present,” a seemingly conventional American wife explores the wilder shores of marital devotion by giving her Italian husband an outrageous gift. “Winter Barley” is the account, alternately lyrical and perverse, of the brief love affair in Scotland between an elderly European prince and a thoroughly modern New England beauty half his age. And in the collection’s title story, “Interesting Women,” a woman on vacation in Thailand reflects with wry detachment on the confessional relationships that spring up between women (“another day, another soul laid bare”), before falling into one herself, which culminates in a hilarious and absurd odyssey through the jungle. Lee’s beautifully crafted stories offer a rare combination: a sensual evocation of the moment, and profound insight into the underlying struggles—of gender, race, and class—that continue to shape our world. Critically acclaimed when it was first published, this collection is ready to be embraced by a new generation of readers.

Interesting Women

Stories

Traveling to Rome to join her beloved husband, Ben, beautiful, young Charis Ward has a fateful encounter with Ezio Jung, an intriguing Italian billionaire whom she meets on the plane, and becomes caught up in an affair that exposes the cracks in her marriage and her own sense of self. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Lost Hearts in Italy

The Rivals

"Andrea Lee's authority as a writer comes of an unstinting honesty and a style at once simple and yet luminous." -- New York Times Book Review

Sarah Phillips

Ian Frazier

Vivian Gornick

Calvin Trillin

Mark Salzman

Tobias Schneebaum

THEY WENT:TRAVEL WRITING PA (Writer's Craft)

The author of Lost Hearts in Italy, having resided in Moscow with her graduate-student husband during 1979, reports on her perceptions of Russian life and people with clarity, grace, and feeling in a new edition of the acclaimed memoir. Reissue.

Russian Journal

For readers of Melissa Bank or Jhumpa Lahiri: witty, seductive stories of expatriate women, their loves and losses.

The Italian phrase Mai due senza tre–“never two without three”–forms the basis of Andrea Lee’s spellbinding novel of betrayal. Sophisticated and richly told, Lost Hearts in Italy reveals a trio caught in the grip of desire, deception, and remorse. When Mira Ward, an American, relocates to Rome with her husband, Nick, she looks forward to a time of exploration and awakening. Young, beautiful, and in love, Mira is on the verge of a writing career, and giddy with the prospect of living abroad. On the trip over, Mira meets Zenin, an older Italian billionaire, who intrigues Mira with his coolness and worldly mystique. A few weeks later, feeling idle and adrift in her new life, Mira agrees to a seemingly innocent lunch with Zenin and is soon catapulted into an intense affair, which moves beyond her control more quickly than she intends. Her job as a travel writer allows clandestine trysts and opulent getaways with Zenin to Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and Venice, and over the next few years, now the mother of a baby daughter, she struggles between resisting and relenting to this man who has such a hold on her. As her marriage erodes, so too does Mira’s sense of self, until she no longer resembles the free spirit she was on her arrival in the on her arrival in the Eternal City. Years later, Mira and Nick, now divorced and remarried to others, look back in an attempt to understand their history, while a detached Zenin assesses his own life and his role in the unlikely love triangle. Each recounts the past, aided by those witness to their failure and fallout. An elegant, raw, and emotionally charged read, Lost Hearts in Italy is a classic coming-of-age story in which cultures collide, innocence dissolves, and those we know most intimately remain foreign to us.

Roman

Sarah Phillips, Wanderin

From National Book Award–nominated writer Andrea Lee comes Red Island House, a travel epic that opens a window on the mysterious African island of Madagascar, and on the dangers of life and love in paradise, as seen through the eyes of a Black American heroine. “People do mysterious things when they think they have found paradise,” reflects Shay, the heroine of Red Island House. When Shay, an intrepid Black American professor, marries Senna, a brash Italian businessman, she doesn’t imagine that her life’s greatest adventure will carry her far beyond their home in Milan: to an idyllic stretch of beach in Madagascar where Senna builds a flamboyant vacation villa. Before she knows it, she becomes the reluctant mistress of a sprawling household, caught between her privileged American upbringing and her connection to the continent of her ancestors. So begins Shay’s journey into the heart of a remote African country. Can she keep her identity and her marriage intact amid the wild beauty and the lingering colonial sins of this mysterious world that both captivates and destroys foreigners? A mesmerizing, powerful tale of travel and self-discovery that evokes Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Red Island House showcases an extraordinary literary voice and gorgeously depicts a lush and unknown world.

Six renowned travel writers describe the creative process involved in this popular form of narrative, drawing on their own works to reveal how to create a sense of place

The Art and Craft of Travel Writing

They Went

In the words of its title character, this novel is set in "the hermetic world of the old-fashioned black bourgeoisie--a group largely unknown to other Americans, which has carried on with cautious pomp for years in eastern cities and suburbs, using its considerable funds to attempt poignant imitations of high society, acting with genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights, and finally producing a generation of children educated in newly integrated schools and impatient to escape the outworn rituals of their parents."

Andrea Lee

Books

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