Alice in Exile
By Piers Paul Read
(St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, 9780312325787, 352pp.)
Publication Date: March 2004
Categories: Romance - Historical
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Alice in Exile is Piers Paul Read's triumphant return to the fiction for which he is widely praised: romantic, dramatic, and rich with detail. It features Alice Fry--an independent woman in a world ruled by men--and the two men who love her. It is 1913 when Alice meets Edward Cobb, the eligible son of a baronet. When Alice's father, a radical publisher, gets involved in a scandal, Edward breaks off their engagement, unaware that Alice is expecting his child. Desperate, she travels to Russia to serve as a governess for charming Baron Rettenberg, as the Russian Revolution and World War I rage on.
Piers Paul Read studied history at Cambridge and is the author of thirteen acclaimed novels and five works of nonfiction, including the international bestseller Alive! and, most recently, The Templars. His previous novels have won the Hawthornden Prize and the Geoffrey Faber, Somerset Maugham, and James Tait Black Awards. He is married with four children and lives in London.
"Alice in Exile is profoundly conventional, absolutely old-fashioned, and I confess to having missed a highly advertised fiesta in a Mexican mountain town just so I could stay in the hotel and find out what happened, from 1913 to 1920, to Alice Fry, her ninny upper-class English lover, Edward Cobb, and her aristocratic Russian protector, Pavel Rettenberg, who ends up being the love of her life." --Carolyn See, Washington Post
"Finally, a heroine you can love and remember. . . . It is actually difficult to put the book down. . . . This is a book of great compassion, lively dialogue and fine romance. You leave the feast feeling stirred and contented." --Houston Chronicle
"Few writers bring the past to life as vividly as Piers Paul Read. . . . Anyone who has enjoyed the best novels of Sebastian Faulks or William Boyd will love this one, and probably find it even better. . . . Utterly gripping. It couldn't be better told." --The Scotsman (U.K.)
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