The Liar’s Wife: Four Novellas Audiobook

The beloved author at her storytelling best: four wonderful novellas of Americans abroad and Europeans in America.

In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title novella, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in America. These stories dazzle on the surface, with beautifully rendered settings and vistas, and dig deep psychologically. At every turn Gordon reveals in her characters' interactions those crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. So richly developed it is hard to believe they fit into novella-sized packages, these tales carry us away both as individual stories and as a larger, book-length experience of Gordon's mastery and human sympathy.

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“These four novellas don’t so much connect as evolve…They build on one another, suggesting interesting dichotomies beyond the traditional positioning of innocence versus experience: travel versus exile, privilege versus affliction, idealism versus survival, responsibility versus complicity…The intelligence that breathes through the characters tirelessly raises the unanswerable questions that animate all great fiction, lifting the reader out of the story and into the realm of ethical dilemma and moral agony.”

— New York Times Book Review