Lucy - Hardcover

Kincaid, Jamaica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374194343 ISBN 13: 9780374194345

Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990

Synopsis

Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple. She begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade at the same time that the mysteries of own sexuality begin to unravel. Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new heroine who is destined to win a place of honor in contemporary fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

Jamaica Kincaid, born in St. John's, Antigua, is the author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction. Her 2013 novel See Now Then was a New York Times bestseller. A former reporter for the New Yorker magazine, she is a professor of literature at Claremont-McKenna College in California.

From Publishers Weekly:

Kincaid ( At the Bottom of the River ; Annie John ) has with this novel created an insouciant yet vulnerable narrator in the person of Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies who works as an au pair for a seemingly happy family in an unidentified city that one assumes is New York. Lucy is fascinated with her discoveries about American life--"At first it was all so new that I had to smile with my mouth turned down at the corners"--and with Mariah, Lewis and their four golden little daughters. Their pleasure in life intrigues Lucy, who observes, "Even when a little rain fell, they would admire the way it streaked through the blank air." Lucy has renounced her own family and past, but at the same time she paradoxically expresses culturally imbued views with arrogance. She sees the world around her with both awe and contempt, and maintains a unique dead certainty about how people are. Her own sexual exploits seem more mysterious to her than the deterioration of Lewis and Mariah's marriage, which she presciently and detachedly observes. This is a slim book but Kincaid has crafted it with a spare elegance that has brilliance in its very simplicity. Lucy's is a haunting voice, and Kincaid's originality has never been more evident. First serial to the New Yorker; Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0374194343
• ISBN 13: 9780374194345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164