First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy's motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.

How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa's story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck's novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.

Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror (Susanna Moore), Tuck's language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa's tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa's fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck's near otherworldly prose.

In Lily Tuck's hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.

Brimming with rich descriptions of a beautiful country....The News From Paraguay evolves from a quirky, elegant tale of an unconventional love affair into a sweeping epic. -- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Lily Tuck's impressive novel offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of 19th century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where European and American figures mix with the Spanish aristocracy of the capital and the indigenous peoples from the surrounding areas.

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano--the future dictator of Paraguay--begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream--one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.

With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

The first biography in any language of one of the most celebrated Italian writers of the twentieth century.

Born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means, Elsa Morante grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and an unshakable commitment to writing. Forced to hide from the Fascists during World War II in a remote mountain hut with her husband, renowned author Alberto Moravia, she re-emerged at war's end to take her place among the premier Italian writers of her day. When Rome was film capital of the world, she counted Pasolini, Visconti, and the young Bertolucci among her circle of friends. She was charismatic, beautiful, and fiercely intelligent; her marriage, a passionate union of literary giants, captivated a nation; her love affairs were intense and often tragic. And until now few Americans have known of this remarkable woman and her powerful, original talent.

Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class. Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inez's corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up like a broom in a corner of her Soho loft. It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.

In an elegant and penetrating first short-story collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Lily Tuck's characters travel to unknown, exotic places and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation -- of the natives, the local customs, the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Instead, these women meet with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them -- lovers, husbands, family members. Finally, they arrive at the sometimes heartbreaking but ultimately optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people or places but within themselves.

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight.

First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy's motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.

How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa's story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck's novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.

Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror (Susanna Moore), Tuck's language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa's tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa's fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck's near otherworldly prose.

In Lily Tuck's hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.

Tuck packs a small universe and decades of emotional history into each story.--Stephan Lee, Entertainment Weekly

Lily Tuck's The House at Belle Fontaine brings together ten of the award-winning author's most exquisitely-wrought and captivating stories. These intimate tales traverse time and continents, revealing apprehensions, passions, secrets, and tragedies among lovers, spouses, landlords and tenants, and lifelong friends. In crisp and penetrating prose, Tuck delicately probes at the lives of her characters as they navigate exotic locales and their own hearts: an artist learns that her deceased husband had an affair with their young houseguest; a retired couple strains to hold together their forty-year-old marriage on a ship bound for Antarctica; and a French family flees to Lima in the 1940s with devastating consequences for their daughter's young nanny.

His hand is growing cold, still she holds it, is how this riveting, deeply moving story of a forty-three year old marriage by National Book Award winner Lily Tuck begins. Unfolding over a single night, Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician--it was a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love.

Slender, powerful, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness is not only an elegant elegy to a man and a marriage, but also a meditation on the theory of probability and how chance can affect both a life and one's consideration of an afterlife.

A mesmerizing new novella and stories from National Book Award winner Lily Tuck

A provocative and haunting new collection from critically acclaimed writer Lily Tuck, Heathcliff Redux, A Novella and Stories explores, with cool precision, the hidden dynamics and unspoken conflicts at the heart of human relationships.

In the novella, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights at the same time that she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian caf ; a forgotten act of violence in New York's Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult.

With keen psychological insight and delicate restraint, Heathcliff Redux, A Novella and Stories pries open the desires, doubts, and secret motives of its characters and exposes their vulnerabilities to the light. Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection from one of our most treasured, award-winning writers.

Mixing family lore, historical events, and photographs, this autobiographical novel creates a portrait of the writer as a young woman...enlivening.--New Yorker

A mosaic of storytelling that is both poetic and absorbing.-- NPR.com

With The Double Life of Liliane National Book Award winner Lily Tuck delivers the most beguiling work of her] career (The Millions)--an astonishing and riveting autobiographical novel in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard, replete with photos and documents. Following the child Liliane as she comes of age between two very different worlds--that of her German movie producer father and her beautiful, artistically talented mother--the preternaturally imaginative Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn and Mary Queen of Scots, piecing together vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. This is an intimate and dynamic coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.

Tuck's prose is elegant. -- New York Times Book Review

Lily Tuck's critically-lauded, bestselling I Married You for Happiness was hailed by the Boston Globe as an artfully crafted still life of one couple's marriage. In her singular new novel Sisters, Tuck gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal.

Tuck's unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife--known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise.

With Sisters, Lily Tuck delivers riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession; charting with elegance and insight love in all its phases.

Tuck's unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife -- known only as she.