Alison's Fiction

Truth And Consequences
(2005)

"This is a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in…as in the best comedies, everyone gets justice, and no one escapes it." — The New Yorker

"There is not one wasted word in Truth and Consequences… Lurie's language is as sharp as the claws of pain that rule Alan's life and the pangs of guilt that threaten Jane's. The book is delightfully readable. You are into it and out of it before you know it, but not without a fresh look at the maneuvers inside marriage." — Chicago Tribune

The Last Resort
(1998)

"This is Alison Lurie's first novel for ten years, but she has not lost her touch Lurie is as acute as ever in her observation of human nature and {we} see how illogical people can be."

Read the first chapter

Women And Ghosts
(1994)

"In her fiction, Ms. Lurie is often cutting, but never heartless. An unadvertised compassion underlies her sometimes curmudgeonly pose; there is always humor in her ill humor -- and nowhere so much as in her first collection of stories, 'Women and Ghosts."

The Truth About Lorin Jones
(1988)

". . .will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse since it dares to make fun of feminism . . . confirms Ms. Lurie's stature as our leading comic novelist."

Foreign Affairs
(1984)

The 1985 Pulitzer Prize
winner for fiction.

This flawless novel earned the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and once again illustrates Lurie's talent for capturing the subtle ironies of human relationships. Two professors are sent to London on research assignments but end up spending more time together than on their work!

Only Children
(1979)

"Mrs Lurie's novels explore the dangerous relations between the imaginary and the real with exact observations and cunning intelligence... collectively the form a biting record of social, moral and sexual mores"

The War Between The Tates
(1974)

"The War Between the Tates' is a novel not only to read, but to reread for its cool and revealing mastery of a social epoch; something 'light and bright and sparkling,' in Reuben Brower's phrase for 'Pride and Prejudice'; a near-perfect comedy of manners and morals to put on the shelf nest to 'Vanity Fair' or 'The Egoist.'"

Read 1974 NY Times review.

Real People
(1969)

"On one level Real People is a dazzlingly comic account of the way and meannesses of artists. On another it is an allegory of the arrival at self knowledge through the recognition of unwelcome realities...But above all it is a superb piece of ironic portraiture"

Imaginary Friends
(1967)

"One of the more gifted novelists around today, Alison Lurie is a specialist in the transmigration of personality. . . . [a] balefully funny put-down of behavioral 'science.'"

The Nowhere City
(1966)

"Los Angeles, of course, is the setting for Alison Lurie's novel 'The Nowhere City' but Miss Lurie's excellent bookmight just as well be called 'The Nowhere Country,' because it distills the prevailing American social climate, of which L. A. is only the purest essence."

Love And Friendship
(1962)

"Alison Lurie's deliciously naughty first novel deflates our fondest illusions about the ties that bind in friendship and illicit romance."

Alison's books can be found in your local library,
at book retailers everywhere, or online at;
Amazon.com - Barnes and Noble - iTunes - IndieBound

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