The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction

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Lily Dahl is a heroine of the old school: tough, beautiful and brave. A nineteen-year-old waitress and aspiring actress living in Webster, Minnesota, she becomes enchanted by an exotic outsider - an artist from New York. Drawn into a world of erotic adventure, she finds herself the target of mysterious acts of madness as she strains against the confines of small town life.

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Praise for The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

  • Compelling...Webster's hot-house atmosphere and collection of oddballs and freaks are brilliantly evoked...She orchestrates suspense masterfully and her writing has a quality of stillness, of effortless deliberation, which is peculiarly suited to the sense of foreboding. - Literary Review

  • Full of humour, surprise and powerful images...Hustvedt's real triumph, though, is to take the ordinary and make it strange while showing how all strangeness is rooted in the ordinary. - Observer

  • Told with the gripping pace of a straightforward mystery tale...A natural born storyteller - Independent

  • A taut and convincing drama, as well as an intriguing metaphysical thriller - Sunday Times

  • Subtle, complex and engaging - Financial Times

  • Hustvedt's powerful theme of small-town mentality shows how intimacy and claustrophobia, secrets and skeletons, come out of the same closet...[an] exploration of the narrow line between imagination and reality while still managing to be a rip-roaring adventure story...beautifully written - Scotsman

  • A startlingly good novel, tautly written and very sexy. - Marie Claire

  • Compelling...Webster's hot-house atmosphere and collection of oddballs and freaks are brilliantly evoked...She orchestrates suspense masterfully and her writing has a quality of stillness, of effortless deliberation, which is peculiarly suited to the sense of foreboding. - Literary Review

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Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, was published by Sceptre in 1993. Since then she has published The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American and The Summer Without Men. She is also the author of the poetry collection Reading To You, and four collections of essays, Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros and Living, Thinking, Looking, as well as the memoir The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves.

Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and in 2012 was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities.

www.sirihustvedt.net

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