WHITING WRITERS’ AWARD | BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER AWARD | BOOK SENSE SELECTION | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR | ALTERNATE FOR PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD
“Lily King’s splendid new novel consists of one beginning after another, all so assured that it’s hard to believe the book itself is her debut”
— Jacqueline Carey, The New York Times Book Review
“This is a lovely book, elegant and wise, full of illuminations about France, and families, and love.”
— Roxana Robinson, author of This Is My Daughter and Summer Light
The Pleasing Hour, Lily’s debut novel, is the story of Rosie, an American au pair in Paris whose coming of age defies all our usual conceptions of naïveté and experience. Rosie is fleeing an unspeakable loss that has left her homesick for her family.
Reviews for The Pleasing Hour
“Here, as with a palimpsest, each new form of pleasing delineated by the author is made more complex by the imprint of the last.”
— The New Yorker
"Delightful… This remarkably well-written book will please you with its funny and sad tale of cultural differences, love, betrayal and motherhood… Introduces a very talented writer of great promise."
— Lelia Ruckenstein, The Washington Post Book World
“King's economy with detail is perfectly calibrated to the tension created by Rosie's language deficit, cultural discomfort and emotional isolation… Though she tells lean stories, King can brush lush descriptions, with majestic colors and vivid, fleeting pleasures.”
—Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times
“Beautifully wrought… what people do to each other and the legacies they leave are King's central subjects, and in her deft hands they're explored in complicated, ambitious ways that leave us feeling as if we've become fluent in a foreign language.”
— Karen Shepard, USA Today
“Lily King's splendid new novel consists of one beginning after another, all so assured that it's hard to believe the book itself is her debut” (Read the full review here.
—Jacqueline Carey, The New York Times Book Review
“King brings alive a palette of colorful and robust characters that might have been collected from an afternoon sidewalk café in Provence. … This is a rich first novel about families lost and found from a promising writer with an ear for the kind of language—language from the heart, that touches deeply.”
—Ron Frascell, The Christian Science Monitor
