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L'Affaire
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
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L'Affaire
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Publisher's Summary
A few days into her trip, Amy is nearly swept away by an avalanche (started, some say, by low-American warplanes). Two of the hotel's guests, esteemed English publisher Adrian Venn and his much younger American wife, Kerry, were not as fortunate as Amy. Both lie comatose in a nearby hospital. Learning that French and English law dictate a very different division of money depending on where Adrian dies, Adrian's children (young, old, legitimate, and illegitimate) assemble in Valmeri to protect their interests should he not pull through.
Amy, already suspect as an American, finds that her nationality freezes the social climate as she steps in to assist the family. In her innocence, Amy sets in motion a series of events in France and England that spotlight ancient national differences, customs, and laws. Add one or two small affairs that may topple carefully balanced alliances, and soon it is as the French say, a situation.
Hailed as witty, delicious, nuanced and fresh by book critics across the country, Diane Johnson has composed her most amusing and insightful character to date in young Amy Hawkins. A contemporary masterpiece sure to entertain, L'Affaire is a perfectly drawn comedy of manners abroad.
What the critics say
"If one were to cross Jane Austen and Henry James, the result would be Diane Johnson." (San Francisco Chronicle)
"Diane Johnson treads, very consciously and cleverly, across the ancient and hallowed turf of the international novel." (New York Times Book Review)
"Has spice and smarts to spare." (Book Magazine)
"Immensely amusing...devilishly on target." (The New York Times Book Review)
“Like the wildly successful Le Divorce and Le Mariage, Johnson's latest novel explores the strange alchemy that occurs when American and European social mores collide.... Johnson's novel is exactly the kind of intricate, bittersweet comedy of manners her many fans have come to expect.” (Booklist)
"Full of tip-top invention [and] lightness of touch that has nearly disappeared from literary fiction, comic or otherwise...a pleasure." (The Atlantic)