The Lovers - by Vendela Vida (Paperback)

About the Book

"Vendela Vida has written a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman's voyage to self-discovery."--Joyce Carol Oates "Stunning. A masterful meditation on grief and love. The Lovers is a sensational novel from one of our finest writers at the height of her craft."--Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries In 2007, Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With her new novel, The Lovers, former Kate Chopin Writing Award winner Vida tells a powerful and beautiful tale of a widow returning alone to the site of her honeymoon in Turkey, and her subsequent journeys through her past and her present.

Book Synopsis

"Vendela Vida has written a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman's voyage to self-discovery."
--Joyce Carol Oates

"Stunning. A masterful meditation on grief and love. The Lovers is a sensational novel from one of our finest writers at the height of her craft."
--Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

In 2007, Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With her new novel, The Lovers, former Kate Chopin Writing Award winner Vida tells a powerful and beautiful tale of a widow returning alone to the site of her honeymoon in Turkey, and her subsequent journeys through her past and her present.

From the Back Cover

From the acclaimed author of the 2007 New York Times Notable Book Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name comes a stunning novel about the love between husbands and wives, mothers and children.

Twenty-eight years ago, Peter and Yvonne honeymooned in the beautiful coastal village of Datça, Turkey. Now Yvonne is a widow, her twin children grown. Hoping to immerse herself in memories of a happier time--as well as sand and sea--Yvonne returns to Datça. But her plans for a restorative week in Turkey are quickly complicated. Instead of comforting her, her memories begin to trouble her.

Overwhelmed by the past and unexpectedly dislocated by the environment, Yvonne clings to a newfound friendship with Ahmet, a local boy who makes his living as a shell collector. But a devastating accident upends her delicate peace and throws her life into chaos--and her sense of self into turmoil.

With the crystalline voice and psychological nuance for which her work has been so celebrated, Vendela Vida has crafted another unforgettable heroine in a stunningly beautiful and mysterious landscape.

Review Quotes

"Vida's work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and THE LOVERS is her best and most disturbing novel yet." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Vida's rich imagery and deep, skillful dives into tangled emotions will keep you riveted." - Daily Candy Chicago
"Vendela Vida's The Lovers is a spare and haunting meditation on how travel can bring us full circle back to the place from which we should have started. I read it over two days and dreamed about it the second night." - Francine Prose, author of GOLDENGROVE
"Vendela Vida has written a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman's voyage to self-discovery as she travels alone in Turkey. Though the aura of dread mounts, as in one of Paul Bowles' eerie and unnerving works of fiction, there are surprising revelations here, and an utterly unpredictable ending." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Quietly provocative, The Lovers explores the perils of self-involvement and the ease with which we destroy one another's lives." - People
"Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Vida tackles questions about grief and identity. The stunning Turkish beach, the almost mystical ancient ruins, and the country's labyrinthine village streets set the perfect stage for her character's catharsis. You can't help but be transported by Vida's melancholy story, a complex psychological portrait of grief and healing." - NPR
"Vida is a subtle writer whose voice is spare and authoritative, at times sounding like a less gothic Paul Bowles, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing...the book is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away." - New York Times Book Review
"[Vida's] third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing...[THE LOVERS] is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away." - New York Times Book Review
"[Vida] has an eye for understated details that leap from the page and linger in the soul...Vida deftly weaves the power of description into the broader tapestry of Yvonne's journey...THE LOVERS, slim and transportive, is an invitation to join Yvonne on her journey. It's worth the trip." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Her best and most disturbing novel yet." - San Francisco Chronicle
"A languorous meditation on how accidents of fate shape a life." - Vogue
"A brilliant, topsy-turvy, twenty-first-century variation on E. M. Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA...Vida creates an atmosphere at once molten and chilling as she deftly exposes the wounding reverberations of timeless conflicts between men and women, parents and children, East and West, appearance and truth." - Booklist
"Sometimes, it seems as if a man would rather struggle into a pair of pantyhose than read a novel by a woman, but everyone might want to take a look at this book. THE LOVERS is somber, seductive, reflective, unsettling. All our lives are journeys...[and] hopefully, we shed some of our ignorance along the way. Vida writes--so beautifully!-- about this process." - Washington Post
"THE LOVERS is somber, seductive, reflective, unsettling. All our lives are journeys...[and] hopefully, we shed some of our ignorance along the way. Vida writes--so beautifully!-- about this process." - Washington Post
"A captivating account of a woman seeking escape and discovering emotional clarity...THE LOVERS is both a meditation on grieving and a gripping page-turner." - The Daily Beast
"Stunning. A masterful meditation on grief and love. The Lovers is a sensational novel from one of our finest writers at the height of her craft." - Stephen Elliott, author of THE ADDERALL DIARIES
"A beautiful, complex journey....Ideal for book clubs...it's filled with rich, luminous prose, and its deceptively delicate plot and pacing provide ample topics for discussion." (Rating: 5 out of 5) - Carrie LaGree, Bookbrowse.com
"There's a certain genre in fiction; the 'woman traveling alone in foreign country when things start to go wrong' story...not every writer can capture...that sense of impending doom and suspense that is almost Graham Greenish. Vendela Vida has nailed it." (Rating: 5 out of 5) - Linda Grana, Bookbrowse.com
"Vida is an elegant, droll writer who gets the strangeness and self-consciousness of traveling alone just right....[THE LOVERS] deserves a place right up there beside [Marguerite Duras's THE LOVER], for it too is a slender and necessary book of great depth and reach." - Vanity Fair
"Haunting....Vida, a cofounder and coeditor of literary magazine The Believer, has a gift for probing the workings of memory." - Time Out New York
"In this thrilling, psychologically astute portrait of a woman's struggle to escape the paralysis of grief, Vida plunges us into a world where nothing is what it seems--where sun-washed streets and spare, clean rooms contain dark histories, where no offer of friendship or comfort is as simple as it appears, and where love and death are inextricably linked. Beautiful and haunting, this novel portrays Yvonne's life beyond her husband's death with Didionesque acuteness; the fact that it delivers so much pleasure in the process is a testament to Vida's immense storytelling gifts." - Julie Orringer, author of HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER and THE BRIDGE
Vendela Vida writes with elegance and economy. In this engrossing novel, she has managed to combine a stingingly acute portrait of grief, a moving meditation on love (both filial and romantic) and a page-turning adventure. - Zo Heller, author of The Believers
"Vida shows she's supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person...clear, simple prose...An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections--a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A wise and generous book." - Aleksandar Hemon, author of National Book Award Finalist THE LAZARUS PROJECT
"THE LOVERS pulls you out to sea with a masterful hypnosis. I was so enthralled by the grief, the sticky and sandy details, and especially the perfect articulation of feminine self-awareness that I didn't realize how deep in I was. I read the last page with a tearful gasp." - Miranda July, author of NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU