The FiFi Report 437

The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories…by Lily Tuck

‘Winner of the National Book Award, Lily Tuck follows her critically-acclaimed novel I Married You For Happiness with an elegantly constructed story collection about lives tethered to the past and the unexpected encounters that threaten to unmoor them.

The powerfully intimate stories within The House at Belle Fontaine span the better part of the twentieth century and almost every continent, laying bare apprehensions, passions, secrets, and tragedies that resonate across time and space. In crisp, spare, and penetrating prose, Lily Tuck unveils and suppresses personal truths as her characters navigate exotic locales and immediate emotional territory: an artist learns that her deceased ex-husband had an especially illicit affair seventeen years before his death; a young couple living in Thailand worries about the mental stability of their best friend, a U. S. army captain; on a ship bound for Antarctica, a retired couple strains to hold together their forty-year-old marriage; and a French family flees to Lima in the 1940s with devastating consequences for their daughter’s young nanny.

With a deft and expert hand, Tuck excavates the opportunities that arise from loss, and the moments that knock lives into a collision course and an uncertain future.’
Pub Date:2013-05-16 Publisher: GROVE PRESS / ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS from Amazon