The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Description

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.

Siri Hustvedt's first novel, THE BLINDFOLD, was published by Sceptre in 1993 and her second, THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL, followed in 1997. Her third novel, WHAT I LOVED, was published in 2003 to great acclaim and has been an international bestseller. Her most recent novel, THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, was published in 2008. She is also the author of Reading to You, a poetry collection, three collections of essays, Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, and A PLEA FOR EROS. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Paul Auster.

'Following the much-acclaimed The Blindfold comes Siri Hustvedt's similarly dark and compelling second novel ... 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.' -- Kate Hubbard, Literary Review 'Hustvedt's writing is full of humour, surprise and powerful images. Lily is an engaging, strong heroine and demonstrates how Hustvedt's writing has matured. Her second novel has an admirable completeness and depth that makes the publication of her third something to be looked forward to. Hustvedt's real triumph, though, is to take the ordinary and make it strange while showing how all strangeness is rooted in the ordinary.' -- Kit Spring, Observer 'It is told with the gripping pace of a straightforward mystery tale ... Hustvedt has a fully-realised cast of odd bods, eccentrics and down-home mid-Western folk ... She tells the story with panache. Her perfectly observed Minnesota world is slightly askew, slightly surreal ... Enchanting, too, is her sensual description of the mid-Western landscape' -- Lucy O'Brien, Independent 'Memorable characters ... Lily Dahl shows us much about femininity and its representations, but Hustvedt's characters are not reducible to her themes. As the plot accelerates, mysteries are left unsolved, and it is in this balance between resolution and irresolution that her novel finds its subtle, complex and engaging strength.' -- Susanna Rustin, 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 ... It is also beautifully written' -- Alice Thompson, Scotsman 'A brilliant story ... This is a startlingly good novel, tautly written and very sexy.' -- Carolyn Hart, Marie Claire 'A compelling portrait of small-town America complete with a plethora of Lynch-like touches ... Excellent characterisation.' -- Susan Mackenzie. List 'She writes like a dream' -- Maria Alvarez, GQ