Lynn Freed

"Three women in their sixties go off to live in Greece for a year, only to have their children, grandchildren, and past lovers invade what was supposed to be a relaxing getaway"--

A Novel

The Last Laugh

"Lynn Freed's deeply personal essays explore our most quintessential question: What makes a home? From very early on she had imagined for herself an ideal life: a stranger in a strange place: someone just arrived, just about to leave, and always with a home to return to. As a teenager on an exchange program to the U.S., she had made up fantastic reasons to escape high school in the suburbs and spend her time in New York City. Accepting a marriage proposal as a young woman, partly because it promised just such a life - away from South Africa, where she'd grown up, and in New York as a graduate student - she found herself both restless and unmoored. At home neither in the place nor in the marriage. What she did find, in the end, was a true marriage between writing and travel, travel and identity. Traversing decades and continents and back again, The Romance of Elsewhere captures the dilemma of the expat and does so with Freed's signature honesty and humor. She takes on subjects as disparate as Disneyland, lovers, eco-tourism, shopping, serious illness, and the anomaly of writers who blossom into full power only in old age. Lynn has been publishing these pieces for the past three decades, and this new collection further establishes her as a renowned voice in memoir and the exploration of identity"--

essays

The romance of elsewhere

Promised by her father to his wealthy and powerful cousin, seventeen-year-old Thea leaves her sheltered life with her mother, an opera singer and Holocaust survivor, to marry a man whose name she does not even know. By the author of The Mirror. 20,000 first printing.

House of Women

This coming-of-age story was selected as one of the Notable Books of the Year (1986) by The New York Times Book Review. In its review earlier that year, The Times said "Freed's guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa." The Washington Post remarked "Here's a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true ... that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny. Home Ground is all this and more."

Home Ground

Promised by her father to his wealthy and powerful cousin, seventeen-year-old Thea leaves her sheltered life with her mother, an opera singer and Holocaust survivor, to marry a man whose name she does not even know. By the author of The Mirror. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The adventures of the Franks are seen through the eyes of the family's youngest daughter, Ruth, who gives a powerful perspective on her family and on South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s

*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice* From the award-winning author Lynn Freed, who’s been called a “literary star” by The New York Times Book Review, comes a hilarious and brilliant new novel about the riotous, passion-filled adventures of three women who thought they were past their prime. To escape their griping grown children, husbands and lovers, and an abundance of grandchildren underfoot, three self-proclaimed “old bags,” Dania, Ruth, and Bess, head for a quiet island on the Aegean Sea. They’ll spend a year by the water—watching the sunset, eating grilled fish and fresh olives, sipping ouzo. They deserve it, they say. After all those years, the three women will finally have some peace. Except that they can’t. For one, Bess, a pampered, once-beautiful inheritress, falls swiftly into an affair with a poetry-writing taxi driver—who has, of course, a territorial wife. And Dania, a therapist, begins to receive an increasing number of cryptically menacing phone calls from a psychotic patient. An ex-lover of Ruth’s shows up unexpectedly, right before one of Bess’s does—and then the women’s children arrive, with their own demanding children in tow. As the island quickly becomes crowded, the women’s serene year in Greece devolves perilously, and uproariously, into something much more complicated. With the wit of Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different and all the adventure of Deborah Moggach’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Lynn Freed’s The Last Laugh is at once wildly funny and deeply perceptive, an exuberant story of friendship and pleasure, family and love.

Lynn Freed

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