From the author of Saint X, a stunning novel about the fate of two children sent to the English countryside to escape the onset of World War II and the aftermath of the decisions they made there.
Evelyn Lieberman has always been good at carrying her grief while carrying on. A widow in a Florida retirement community, she keeps busy with regular visits to her grandchildren and a full social calendar with her friends, the Girls. She speaks little about her past and is proud of the life she has built in the present.
When Evelyn’s friend recommends a book by a prominent British author, Simon Glaser, Evelyn is startled to find that the novel tells a hauntingly familiar story. She decides to seek out the book’s writer, the only other person who could have known the details of what happened all those decades ago.
Spanning prewar Vienna, the Yorkshire moors, postwar New York, a Florida retirement community, and the London literary world, Two Lives is a sweeping and masterful exploration of heritage, memory, and the human yearning to reconcile our pasts with our present and take the measure of our lives.
Two Lives
A Novel
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Praise for Alexis Schaitkin
“Alexis Schaitkin has accomplished something brilliant and rare in this novel that bridges two eras while feeling wholly alive in the present. Written with grace, humor, and a fierce intelligence, Two Lives interrogates memory and the uneasy work of reconciling the lives we remember with the lives others remember for us. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about this marvel of a book.”
“In Evelyn and Simon, Alexis Schaitkin has created two unforgettable characters whose lives intertwine over decades and continents in a riveting story of secrets, memories, heartbreak, and resilience: a book within a book for the ages. Two Lives is a dazzling and deeply moving novel from one of America’s premier literary talents.”
“Two Lives is a story of unparalleled intimacy. The love between Evelyn and Simon defies categorization, as does the secret they alone carry. Alexis Schaitkin’s writing is stunning, as is her unerring commitment to summoning characters in their totality. I read with my heart in my throat. Unforgettable.”
“In a time defined by cruelty, how can a child—or an octogenarian, for that matter—make sense of a stranger’s kindness? Alexis Schaitkin never gives in to sentiment, which is precisely what makes this masterful, morally complex story so moving in the end.”
“Two Lives is any number of spectacularly realized books and masterful performances in one slim volume. It’s at once a wryly penetrating portrait of ageing in general, the Jewish version in south Florida in particular, and a cultural anthropology of the American upper middle class; a heartbreaking page-turner on the accidents of fate, the tragedies of the Kindertransport, and the way children deal with trauma by choosing to neither know nor wonder; a consideration of both the solaces and limitations of a life spent pilfering from experience in the service of one’s art; and a meditation on how, when it comes to our past lives, we carry our grief while carrying on.”
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