A novel based on the life of eighteenth-century aristocrat Lucy Dillon, who survived the French Revolution's Terror and embraced a new life in America. A daughter of noble privilege whose mother was once a favorite of Queen Marie Antoinette, Lucy Dillon mingled in high society circles but acted with an unconventional spirit inherited from her Irish ancestors. Wedded to military officer Frédéric-Séraphin, the Marquis de La Tour-du-Pin, she embraced her life as wife and mother while assuming her mother's place as a lady-in-waiting to the queen. Then in 1789, her family went into hiding as the Revolution swept through Paris, feeding the aristocracy to the thirsty guillotine. They escaped to America and started a new life as farmers in the Hudson Valley. There Lucy rises to the challenge of the hard physical labor, finding new meaning and purpose away from the pomp and circumstance that once defined her role, further inspired by the American way of life after meeting Alexander Hamilton and his father-in-law Philip Schuyler, and reuniting with her friend Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the French statesman in exile. But now the Revolution has ended. A new French government has been established, and Frédéric is ready to return home to reclaim his wealth and birthright. But after so many years of toil, Lucy is no longer the noblewoman she once was . . . "A beautiful, authentic, intelligent, and page-turning story . . . a feast for the senses." —Amy Tan "Written in elegant, spare sentences that recall the language of the period . . . Bluebird forms that rare, exquisite a historical novel where the history lesson works to illuminate the life of the hero instead of the other way around." —Time Out New York
Author
Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the younger of two girls. Upon matriculation at 17 from Saint Andrews, with a distinction in history (1958), she left the country for Europe. She lived for 15 years in Paris, where she married, did her undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne, and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three girls, she moved to the USA in 1981, and did an MFA in writing at Columbia. In the summer of 1987, her first published story, “The Mountain,” came out in “The Quarterly” and received an O’Henry prize and was published in the O’Henry Prize Stories of 1988. It also became the first chapter in her first novel, "The Perfect Place," which was published by Knopf the next year.
