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The remarkable flow of this fascinating short novel is mesmerizing. A difficult proposition if forced to put it down, and rare in the book-reading business. A writer who knows words and what they do, who thinks about the many questions posed in life, and one who examines them with courage and relentless charm. Lily Tuck is a great choice to spend extended time with.

I first heard of Lily Tuck in a fiction-writing class Gordon Lish was conducting during the summer of 1995 in Bloomington, Indiana. Tuck was another of the many writers Lish had acquired in his stable as editor for seventeen years at Alfred Knopf. But in class he championed loudly the skills of Lily Tuck and brought her to the attention of perhaps hundreds of his students. And because there were so many writers the great Lish published in his tenure at Knopf, and for the most part commercial failures amounting to a high percentage, Tuck has gone basically unnoticed by the mainstream, even though she won the coveted 2004 National Book Award in fiction for her novel The News from Paraguay. Her first book, published by Lish, Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, remains on my shelf, still unread after two previous false starts. But after reading Sisters I am intent now on a sufficiently renewed attack on those pages as soon as possible. Tuck is sophisticated, and obviously born of that class, based on her range of knowledge of the cultural elite.

Few writers can make you feel you are with them in the room. Intimately. Lily Tuck employs with her voice several anecdotal references to expensive tastes. With the ear of a classic composer, she plays her song adroitly, and disregarding the consequences of infidelities, makes them all feel worth it.