Fic­tion

Anto­nia Live­ly Breaks the Silence: A Novel

  • From the Publisher
May 31, 2013

One writer’s mys­te­ri­ous death, another’s relent­less quest for fame, and a bit­ter lit­er­ary critic’s pas­sion for manip­u­la­tion dri­ve the sto­ry of this haunt­ing nov­el set in a small upstate New York col­lege town in the 1990s.

Cather­ine Strayed won­ders if she’ll ever know the truth about the death of her hus­band, a promis­ing writer who died under cir­cum­stances that could have been acci­den­tal, a sui­cide, or per­haps even mur­der. But after his death, instead of leav­ing the seclud­ed col­lege town to which he had brought her, she sim­ply tries to go on with her life there. When her for­mer men­tor, who had also briefly been her lover — a pow­er­ful crit­ic who sin­gle­hand­ed­ly destroyed her husband’s chance for suc­cess — takes a teach­ing job at the col­lege, Catherine’s world threat­ens to collapse.

For with him has come his lat­est pro­tege, an exot­ic young woman named Anto­nia Live­ly who has writ­ten a nov­el that has become a lit­er­ary sen­sa­tion. She insin­u­ates her­self into Catherine’s life, and mys­te­ri­ous and fright­en­ing things start to hap­pen as, unbe­knownst to Cather­ine, the younger woman sets out to steal the truth of her life and the death of her hus­band so that she can plun­der them for her next lit­er­ary triumph.

Levinson’s rich­ly craft­ed char­ac­ters and his taut­ly drawn plot mark the debut of an excit­ing young talent.

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