Lillian on Life

Life and love lessons as told by sassy narrator Lillian as she looks back in this brilliantly written, bold debut.

Lillian, a single, well-travelled woman of a certain age, wakes up next to her married lover and looks back at her life. It's not at all the life she expected.

Walking the unpaved road between traditional and modern options for women, Lillian has grappled with parental disappointment, society's expectations and the vagaries of love and sex. As a narrator she's bold and witty, and her reflections - from 'On Getting to Sex' to 'On the Importance of Big Pockets' or 'On Leaving in Order to Stay' - reverberate originally and unpredictably.

In Lillian on Life, Alison Jean Lester has created a brutally honest portrait of a woman living through the post-war decades of change in Munich, Paris, London and New York. Her story resonates with the glamour and energy of those cities. Smart, poignant, funny in the vein of The Best of Everything while being wholly original, Lillian on Life is as fresh and surprising as fiction gets.

I absolutely loved it. A delight . . . so fresh and clever and subversive - KATE ATKINSON, author of Life After Life

‘A beautifully written, deft debut; edgy, elegant Lillian will stay with you.’ - ADELE PARKS

“I'll never forget Lillian on Life. Looking backward, she's brutally honest about her needs, her lovers, her parents. Salinger could have invented her . . . Roth would have loved her . . . and so will you.” Ilene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss and What I Wore

“What a splendid book! By turns acerbic and warm, urbane and homespun, Lillian on Life is - like its protagonist - charming, funny, and unabashedly smart. But as slender and enjoyable as this book is, it's much more than simply a lark. Each elegantly compressed chapter leaves us luxuriating in thought: about the snippets of experience so vividly depicted, and about those that have been, with perfect art, left out.” - Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others

“In this remarkably mature first novel, Alison Jean Lester has channeled the worldly yet wistful elegance of Colette to portray an unforgettable heroine. Lillian's provocative reflections on love, vanity, sexual intimacy, and surviving as an independent woman over half a century are deeply moving”Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Widower’s Tale