The Nowhere City

I’m mad about Lurie… I have a thing for over-educated adulterers in fiction * Guardian *
I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you’re new to them, lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, their witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational. – Helen Simpson
Lurie shows some really fine ironic humor… An incisive and very witty novel * Kirkus Reviews *
Perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet
The Queen Herod of contemporary fiction
Marvellous entertainment * Sunday Times *
A very witty, assured, sustained creation of both people and place * New Statesman *
Lurie treats Los Angeles as worth looking at closely, not just as a backcloth…often very funny, always easily readable * Punch *
Absorbing new cautionary tale…intelligent and entertaining * Observer *

Alison Lurie published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina etranger), and The Last Resort. She was also the author of many works of non-fiction, including The Language of Clothes, Don’t Tell the Grownups, Familiar Spirits (a memoir of the poet James Merrill) and two collections of essays and reviews, Reading for Fun and Words and Worlds. She taught literature, folklore and creative writing at Cornell University for many years and was the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lived in upstate New York but also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which provided settings for her fiction. She married the writer Edward Hower, and had three sons and three grandchildren. Alison Lurie died in 2020.

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