Foreign Bodies

Cynthia Ozick

From Shelf: The 2012 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, Foreign Bodies is a dazzling and profound exploration of the human face of the central relationship in the last century: that between the old world and the new.

The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale's life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother's family. By one of America's great living writers, Foreign Bodies is a truly virtuosic novel. The story of Bea's travails on the continent is a fierce and heartbreaking insight into the curious nature of love: how it can be commanded and abused; earned and cherished; or even lost altogether.