Search results for ""Author Claire Messud""

A jewel of a novel by New York Times-bestselling author Claire Messud When the Armstrong family moves from New York at the dawn of the 1970s, Australia feels, to Alice Armstrong, like the end of the earth. Residing in a grand manor on the glittering Sydney Harbour, her family finds their life has turned upside down. As she navigates this strange new world, Alice must weave an existence from its shimmering mirage. Lies and self-deception are at the heart of this keenly observed story. This is a sharp, biting, and playful tale with a cast of unscrupulous characters adrift in a dream life of their own making. Written with the characteristic delicacy of touch, humor, and emotional insight that make Claire Messud one of our greatest writers. “A novelist of unnerving talent.” —The New York Times Book Review “[Messud is] among our greatest contemporary writers.” —The New Yorker “A perfect frolic of a book, puffed on breezes of beauty and wit: it waltzes you through a little fear, a little darkness, and tips you out, refreshed and laughing, into the sun.” —Helen Garner

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In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).

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Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl: a good daughter, colleague, friend, employee. She teaches at an elementary school where the children and the parents adore her; but her real passion is her art, which she makes alone, unseen. One day Reza Shahid appears in her classroom: eight years old, a perfect, beautiful boy. Reza's father has a fellowship at Harvard and his mother is a glamorous and successful installation artist. Nora is admitted into their charmed circle, and everything is transformed. Or so she believes. Liberation from her old life is not quite what it seems, and she is about to suffer a betrayal more monstrous than anything she could have imagined.

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In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).

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*A TIME MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 **AN OPRAH DAILY MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024**AN OBSERVER 2024 PICK**A GUARDIAN 2024 PICK*''An epic family odyssey... ambitious and compelling'' Guardian Book of the DayJune 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars'' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search

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Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Claire's most personal essays - reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into the precarious nature of girlhood, the role narrative plays in giving shape to a life and the power of language. As the book progresses, we then see how these questions translate into Messud's rich body of criticism. In sections on literature and visual arts, Claire opens up the 'radical strangeness' of childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO; the search for the self in Saul Friedlander; the fragility and danger of girlhood captured by Sally Mann; and the search for justice in Valeria Luiselli's THE LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE. But it is the idea of the relationship between form and meaning to which this collection returns again and again. It is 'the tension between form and freedom - the paradox that fierce constraint, or restraint, [that] can allow for the greatest liberty'. As she writes, in a time 'in which our ideals appear shattered and abandoned', it is in the return to language and to stories that 'we return to the essentials that make us human. It is to find the past and the present restored, and with them, the possibility of the future'.

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Moving between colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England, The Last Life is Claire Messud’s “masterly” (Wall Street Journal) sophomore novel of lies and ghosts, love and honor. When shots from a grandfather’s rifle shatter the LaBasse family’s quiet integrity, long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before he was even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed, a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue—the family business—to its knees. Unforgettably narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard for truth, The Last Life is a “phenomenally controlled tour de force” (Sarah Kerr, Vogue). “Messud textures her novel with all the sensory pleasures that bind us to life, and fills it with characters who helplessly respond to each other’s unspoken signals and nuances.”—The New Yorker “Original, intense, and gripping.”—Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books

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In two jewel-like novellas, Claire Messud explores isolation and the nature of love. “A Simple Tale” is the moving story of Maria Poniatowski, an aging Ukrainian woman who, after liberation from servitude to the Germans, struggles with a new life in Canada. What of the past is she able to preserve, without burdening her present? “The Hunters,” the second novella, tells the story of an American academic in London who grows obsessed with the neighbors downstairs. Loneliness breeds an active imagination, one that may be destructive.

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A bracing and hypnotic portrait of the complexities of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of The Woman Upstairs.Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge: while Julia comes from a stable, happy, middle-class family, Cassie never knew her father, who died when she was an infant, and has an increasingly tempestuous relationship with her single mother, Bev. When Bev becomes involved with the mysterious Anders Shute, Cassie feels cruelly abandoned. Disturbed, angry and desperate for answers, she sets out on a journey that will put her own life in danger, and shatter her oldest friendship. Compact, compelling, and ferociously sad, The Burning Girl is at once a story about childhood, friendship and community, and a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about childhood and friendship. Claire Messud brilliantly mixes folklore and Bildungsroman, exploring the ways in which our made-up stories, and their consequences, become real.

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Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence. Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way.

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Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence. Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way. The Burning Girl was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Financial Times, Town & Country, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Refinery29, and Literary Hub.

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In this highly acclaimed novel, life isn’t all Emmy and Virginia Simpson anticipated. When Emmy’s marriage ends, she flees her home in Sydney to “find herself” on the island of Bali—only to become embroiled with a crew of international misfits and smugglers. Her prim and pious sister Virginia, meanwhile, has never wandered far outside of London. Struggling to find meaning, Virginia follows her aging mother’s advice to vacation on the Isle of Skye. On these two islands halfway around the world, the middle-aged sisters confront the costs of self-knowledge and their destinies with unexpected consequences.

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'An uplifting work: complex, precise and bracing' Susie Boyt, Financial Times'A profound book about the intrication of literature and life, about the modest, miraculous ways art helps us to live' Garth GreenwellIn twenty-nine intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Claire Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again 'an absolute master storyteller' (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard

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CLASSIC THRILLER BEHIND THE HITCHCOCK FILM AND HIGHSMITH'S FIRST NOVELBy the bestselling author of The Talented Mr Ripley and Carol 'Her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability' SUNDAY TIMES 'The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense' MARK BILLINGHAM 'A gem . . . A magnificent suspense' DAILY MAILThe psychologists would call it folie a deux . . .'Bruno slammed his palms together. "Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?'''Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he'll murder Haines's wife if Haines will murder Bruno's father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. From this moment, almost against his conscious will, he is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities.

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Quartet, Jean Rhys’s first novel, launched her literary career in the late 1920s, and today remains an incisive, sinister tale of love and obsession. After her husband, Stephan, is arrested, Marya finds herself destitute in Paris. With nowhere else to turn, she accepts the hospitality of an English couple living on the fringes of the artistic world. Yet as Marya is drawn inexorably into their universe, she becomes entangled in a bizarre sexual and psychological relationship that frightens even as it fascinates her—and as the date of Stephan’s release from prison draws near, Marya’s new life splits apart at the seams.

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On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. "From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

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With an introduction by Neel Mukherjee.In Manhattan, just after the century's turn, three thirty-year-old friends, Danielle, Marina and Julius, are seeking their fortunes. But the arrival of Marina's young cousin Bootie - fresh from the provinces and keen, too, to make his mark - forces them to confront their own desires and expectations.The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud is an American classic: a sweeping portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world, and a haunting illustration of how the events of a single day can change everything, for ever.

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Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time. David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

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