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Lore Segal, An Absence of Cousins

256PP DELUXE PBK ORIGINAL WITH FLAPS
ISBN: 978-1914502101
ePub: 9781914502118
OUT 25 July 2024

£9.99

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an absence of cousins

by lore segal

Segal’s Pulitzer nominated title

The first UK publication of Lore Segal’s Pulitzer-finalist novel, following on from her acclaimed Ladies’ Lunch.

Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but ‘elective cousins’. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to – a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares – the institute’s director and his wry, acerbic wife – hold the key?

In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door.

Includes the acclaimed New Yorker podcast story, “The Reverse Bug”.

Reviews

‘Lore Segal has the sharp analytic eye of a born writer’ New York Times Book Review 

‘Segal has the dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotions’ The Washington Post

‘I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor ... Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both’ Jennifer Egan

‘Lore Segal is a national treasure, brilliant, unsentimental, and wry’ LitHub

‘Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation’ Kirkus Review

‘Her themes are big - memory, genocide, refugees, race - but her approach is fine-grained’ - The Paris Review

See a beautiful filmed interview of Lore Segal at age 90 years in conversation with Neil Munshi of the Financial Times, June 2018. Plus a special featured Long Read interview.

“Segal has the dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotions”
— Washington Post

related news

Lore Segal is interviewed in the 2000 Academy award-winning documentary documentary Into the Arms of Strangers, Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, narrated by Judi Dench.

For nine months prior to World War II, in an act of mercy unequalled anywhere else before the war, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission, opening its doors to over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children, or Kinder (sing. Kind), as they came to be known, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again.

For Review Purposes Only. A very important historical and psychohistorical document that needs to be known by everybody as it concerns the holocaust against Jewish people, but offers a positive outlook on Britain who at the time was rescuing many Jewish children to Britain, under a government policy.