Böcker av Lisa Alther

A new novel, funny, wise, moving, true, as only Lisa Alther can write ("she had me laughing at 4 in the morning"--Doris Lessing), set on a cruise ship, about a woman, a doctor, in charge of the ship''s clinic, recovering from the loss of her longtime female lover, a much-admired writer, and coping with the high-wire madcappery of cruise ship life as she reckons with her past and feels her way into the future.Dr. Jessie Drake, in her mid-sixties, following the sudden deaths of her parents and Kat, her partner of twenty years, has fled the Vermont life she has known for decades.In an effort to escape the oppressive constancy of grief, she accepts a job from an old flame from her residency in New York City''s Roosevelt Hospital, and agrees to assist Ben as the ship''s doctor on a British liner. Jesse boards in Hong Kong and as the Amphitrite sails throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, cruise ship antics ensue. Jessie is lulled back into a long-ago romance with the ship''s co-doctor, and both she and her new/old beau become enmeshed with the ship''s lead (female) singer/entertainer. Among the passengers who fling socialized behavior aside on the high seas: a former Florida beauty queen (Miss Florida Power and Light) on a second honeymoon with her husband, as she causes high-velocity scandal, while juggling onboard affairs with a suicidal golf pro, and a defrocked priest hired as the liner''s ''Gentleman Host'', until she vanishes--poof!--from the ship off the coast of Portugal . . . As the ship sails through the Gulf of Aden, and into a possible hijacking by Somali pirates, Jessie retreats into her lover''s journals, written during her final months, journals filled with sketches of potential characters, observations on life and love--as well as drafts of a long new poem in-progress, "Swan Song," that seems to be about being in love with someone else, someone new. As Jessie''s grief turns to suspicion about the woman she thought she knew so well, her illumination of the poem''s meaning begins to lift the constraints of the past and make clear the way toward the future.

A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, rewards, and demands of womanhood.Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood. About Women is their extended conversation in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, and their views on love, style, self-invention, feminism, and child rearing. They also discuss the creative impulse and the importance of art as they ponder what it means to be a woman.

Meet Ginny Babcock, a woman of the 1960s, flower child, cheerleader, dutiful daughter and wayward wifeThe classic novel of the 1960s woman, yearning for security, desperate for adventureThe clever, wicked, honest and tragic forerunner to BRIDGET JONES