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.
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An absence of cousins
FictionAuthor Segal, Lore Groszmann Published by Sort Of Books ISBN 9781914502101 EAN 9781914502101 Bic Code FBA Cover Paperback
£9.99