books > ladies lunch & other stories
144pp deluxe pbk original with flaps
ISBN: 978-1914502033
ePub: 9781914502040
£9.99
all books
ladies’ lunch & other stories
by lore segal
Out 8th March on Lore Segal’s 95th Birthday.
Five close friends in their 90s meet – as they have for decades –for their monthly ‘ladies’ lunch’ to puzzle over and laugh at the enigmas and affronts of ageing. When one of their number is placed unhappily in a home the others conspire to spring her.
Lore Segal’s witty yet poignant short story, Ladies’ Lunch, appeared in the New Yorker in 2017, when she herself turned ninety. It was followed by four sequels. For this sparkling collection, Segal has returned to her group of erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians in Manhattan to create a novella from the linked stories, offering startling insights into friendship and mortality.
In the book’s Other Stories, Segal includes tales from her acclaimed and prizewinning oeuvre to illuminate the hinterland of her characters – one of whom, like her, was a kindertransport refugee.
Beautifully crafted and profound, these stories distil the spirit of one of America’s great authors to show us what a long life might bring.
Reviews
‘Lore Segal has the sharp analytic eye of a born writer’ New York Times Book Review
‘A marvellous and singular writer’ Observer
‘Segal has the dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotions’ Washington Post
‘I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor.... Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both’ Jennifer Egan
‘If America had anything resembling a wise elder, it would be Lore Segal’ Shalom Auslander
See a beautiful filmed interview of Lore Segal at age 90 years in conversation with Neil Munshi of the Financial Times, June 2018. Plus a special featured Long Read interview.
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“Segal has the dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotions”
related news
Lore Segal is interviewed in the 2000 Academy award-winning documentary documentary Into the Arms of Strangers, Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, narrated by Judi Dench.
For nine months prior to World War II, in an act of mercy unequalled anywhere else before the war, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission, opening its doors to over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children, or Kinder (sing. Kind), as they came to be known, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again.