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Lillian on Life
By Alison Jean Lester
On a New York morning after a lot of red wine, 57-year-old Lillian wakes up next to her married lover and takes stock.
How did she get here?
Where is she going?
Can this be as good as it is going to get?
With her own hard-won brand of wisdom, Lillian reflects on a life which began in 1930s Missouri and developed in Munich, Paris, and London. She draws a vivid picture of the unpaved road between traditional and modern opportunities for women, of societal expectations and parental disappointment, of wins and losses in love, and of professional and personal choices, all of which have led to her solitary breakfast this morning.
In Lillian, Alison Jean Lester has created an indelible and brutally honest portrait of a witty, charming, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes heartbroken woman becoming herself during the decades of change following World War II.
I absolutely loved Lillian on Life. It was a delight. The style of it so fresh and clever and subversive and there’s something very brave about it.
Kate Atkinson, #1 New York Times best selling author of Life After Life
What a great voice, what energy and wit. I enjoyed Lillian's travels, her various jobs, and her lovers. She had moments of great wisdom and I was drawn especially to those. In the midst of the humor and the happenings, a sentence or two of such profundity. I thought the book was very original and often extremely funny, but always with an edge. I completely loved it!
Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times best selling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
A beautifully written, deft debut; edgy, elegant Lillian will stay with you.
Adele Parks, best selling author of Spare Brides and Husbands
In a remarkably confident debut, a woman’s life is revealed through fragments and meditations hinting at a life of great daring and unrealized dreams. ... A slim novel that feels just perfect—each thought measured, each syllable counted, a kind of haiku to an independent woman.
Kirkus
Lester’s novel about a tenacious, well-traveled heroine of a certain age is replete with the profound and comical observations of a vivacious spirit.
O, The Oprah Magazine