The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Compelling...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. * <i>Literary Review</i> * Full of humour, surprise and powerful images...Hustvedt's real triumph, though, is to take the ordinary and make it strange while showing how all strangeness is rooted in the ordinary. * <i>Observer</i> * Told with the gripping pace of a straightforward mystery tale...A natural born storyteller * <i>Independent</i> * A taut and convincing drama, as well as an intriguing metaphysical thriller * <i>Sunday Times</i> * Subtle, complex and engaging * <i>Financial Times</i> * 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...beautifully written * <i>Scotsman</i> * A startlingly good novel, tautly written and very sexy. * <i>Marie Claire</i> *

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller What I Loved, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros, Living, Thinking, Looking and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection, Reading To You, and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.