A People Magazine Pick

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 16, 2009)
ISBN: 0151012806

In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and within a few months traded partners. This was in Canberra, where my father, an Australian diplomat, had just brought us home from a posting in Washington. The other couple were American but diplomats, too, finishing a post in Canberra before returning to the United States. Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim, and ambitious; both women were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name. This was my counterpart, Jenny, and me. The two families had so much in common, people said: They must meet.

“From its calm, startling first sentence, this book is a clear-eyed account of a tumultuous childhood that happened, literally and figuratively, all over the place. Jane Alison writes about displacement, identity, belonging, fear, and perhaps most indelibly, rivalry. She may have felt insecure as a child, but she’s incredibly secure as a writer; and it’s this strange mixture—precise and graceful description of profoundly unsettling events—that underlies the alchemy of this book.”
—Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index

“An incomparable personal story, exquisitely, stunningly told.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Enormously compelling . . . a truly unusual, harrowing journey of identity.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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The Love-Artist
"Two things ruined me: a poem and an error."

Hardcover: 242 pages
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux;
1st edition (April 1, 2001)
ISBN: 0374231796

Why was Ovid, the most popular author of his day, banished to the edge of the Roman Empire? Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate work and perhaps his most accomplished? Between the known details of Ovid’s life and these enigmas, The Love-Artist interpolates a haunting drama of passion and psychological manipulation.

“A wonderfully seductive first novel . . . that shimmers with the musical artifice of Ovid’s poetry while evoking the darker tragedies of his life . . . Alison has found a voice, at once modern and archaic, lyrical and potent, that mesmerizes the reader . . . . A small, twinkling jewel of a novel.”
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“The kind of work that deserves a large and enthusiastic following . . . . exquisitely direct and moving.”
--Baltimore Sun

“A remarkable debut: both historical novel and exotic love story, The Love-Artist has the complexity, color, and nearly ecstatic liveliness of a mosaic newly restored, revealing the past as undeniably contemporary.”
--Providence Sunday Journal

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The Marriage of the Sea
A New York Times Notable Book of 2003.

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 16, 2003)
ISBN: 0374199418

A tragical comedy set in New Orleans and Venice, about four men, three women, food, architecture, love, despair . . . and water. With wit, sympathy, and surpassing deftness, The Marriage of the Sea draws an intricate quadrille among seven characters drawn by love and loneliness, aspiration and desperation, to these famously romantic, venal, and elusive cities of water.

“Ambitious, complex, challengingly intellectual . . . a creation of real beauty. . . . A real achievement.”
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Positively Shakespearean . . . a book of troubling marvels.”
--Memphis Commercial Appeal

“The Marriage of the Sea . . . flows with stylistic brilliance.”
--Baltimore Sun

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Natives and Exotics
A National Public Radio summer selection

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Harcourt
(May 9, 2005)
ISBN: 0151012016

hear an excerpt: npr.natives.and.exotics

It’s a difficult thing to crave, land, especially when your body is small. And a dangerous thing, too, when you have no business being there, when it’s not even where you’re from.

Alice, an unrooted child of diplomats in South America Violet, a newlywed settling in the Australian scrub George, a gardener fleeing the violent Clearances.

Three generations wander a world scarred by colonialism and disturbing scientific revelations, from the unearthing of the first dinosaur bones to the discovery that the continents drift, in a hypnotic novel about our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

...read an excerpt "Rapturous."
--Vanity Fair

"A tender, lyrical novel . . . . a lush evocation of the way people love and alter (and are altered by) the environments they inhabit."
--Publishers Weekly

"Alison stakes a powerful claim to the best socially conscious literature."
--Charlotte Observer.

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