Foreign Bodies

An absorbing achievement ... A nimble entertaining literary homage but it is also chillingly what James would have called the real thing.New York Times Book Review Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel she retraces Henry Jamess The Ambassadors and delivers a brilliant utterly new American classic. At the center of the story is Bea Nightingale a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged difficult brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows she becomes entangled in the lives of his family. Over the course of a few months she travels from New York to Paris to Hollywood aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother and finally facing her ex-husband to shake off his lingering sneers from decades past. As she inadvertently wreaks havoc in their lives every one of them is irrevocably changed. . Raucous funny ferocious and tragic. A literary master as James was Ozick makes all those qualities fit together seamlessly and with heartbreaking effect.Philadelphia Inquirer . Dazzling even masterful.Entertainment Weekly .