A Good Woman

‘I'm a huge fan of Lisa Appignanesi. She has a great talent for developing complex, interesting characters, and her descriptions of places are powerful and emotive. Unholy Loves,a dense and beautifully constructed (thriller)... is her finest work.
She takes us to the Loire valley in 1900, where Marguerite, wife of the Comte de Landois, travels from Paris to the country at her husband's command. Marguerite de Landois is a magnificent creation. Appignanesi manages to make her a personification of the French belle epoque and, unlike some authors, she never adds modern touces to make her more "interesting" or "accessible." Marguerite owes more to Madame Bovary than to Simone de Beauvoir.'

As Chief Inspector Emile Durand of the Paris branch of the Surete search for clues to murder... Appignanesi uses their intellectual communion to probe belle epoque ideas art, politics and romance. It is a magnificent conceit and it works perfectly. If you ever believed that 90 per cent of sex is in the brain, you'll love this book.' Margaret Cameron, The Globe and Mail.

McArthur & Co., 352 pages, $24.95

‘What gives this wonderfully sparse book its tension and grasp are the clashes between two movements - like two cymbals being brought together, the movement backwards of memory, and the movement forwards of consequen
ces. And so it speaks history, and one cannot stop listening.’ - John Berger
Bruno Lind is on a mission, though he may not know it. Irene Davies knows she is, but isn’t sure it’s the right one. Both of them are haunted by the legacy of a tangled history of love and war. When Bruno Lind returns to Vienna, the city of his birth, after an absence of many years, more awaits him than his memory hinted. Yet Lind is an expert on memory, a neuroscientist of international renown. His own story, dredged from the past, shouldn’t elude his possibilities of explanation. Propelled by dreams, a chance name overheard in a hotel lobby, and the urgings of his daughter, Lind becomes the detective of his own unexplored life. He retraces those experiences of the Second World War, of refugee camps and migration, he has long been unable to communicate. They take him to Poland and points East, to lost families and forgotten loves. They immerse him in a world where some can’t remember and others can’t forget, and all are tainted by the logic of race.In this poignant novel, studded with vivid characters and rare humour, Appignanesi returns to the terrain of her acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of central Europe, she has created a compelling fiction which is also an exploration of mind and memory. ‘The way she intertwines past and present, nightmare and social comedy, brutal suffering and contemporary flirtation is adroit and elegant. This is a book everyone will read with horror and fascination.’
- Edmund White

' Lisa Appignanesi 's well-researched and gracefully written Cabaret is as frisky, smart, mischievous, and high-stepping as the art form she comprehensively chronicles.' John Lahr, The New Yorker This captivating book presents a uniquely comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians and theatre directors have gathered since 1881, when Le Chat Noir, opened its doors in Paris to become a meeting place of the avant-garde and a laboratory for subversive laughter. Appignanesi traces the journey of cabaret across Europe and to the United States , through its links with the Futurists and Dadaists, from St Petersburg to London and Zurich , and into its Weimar heyday. This new edition comes with a wealth of new material from eastern Europe and explores the post-war life of the cabaret , as well as the splintering of the form into stand-up comedy and club life. 'Wonderfully research and beautifully illustrated ( Cabaret is) and admirable supplement to the history of the twentieth century.' Jonathan Miller

Yale University Press £25.00 ISBN 0 300 10580 0

Being a singleton of 30 something may have its problems. Being one as you approach fifty and have a teenage daughter to boot, would provide a challenge even to Jane Austen. Enter Jude Brautigan, divorcee, bookshop owner, daughter, mother, friend and fierce letter writer. Kicking fifty, Jude finds herself sandwiched between a demented mum and a rarely sensible daughter - whose hormones rage in a direction opposite to her own, though not always with dissimilar consequences.

Jude doesn't like to confess it, even to her old (and thus inevitably, feminist) self, but she still harbours perverse urges: she wouldn't mind a lover; she wouldn't even mind something a little more sentimentally permanent, though to speak of permanence at her waning age feels a little like tempting fate. Which is precisely what takes over in this warm and witty novel. After all, a sense of humour may be the only sense we're finally left with.

McArthur & Co.; 2003 $24.95

Paris 1899. Capital of the crime passionel. Paris is electric with excitement. Everywhere preparations are underway for the universal exhibition and the new century - an age of speed and modernity. But the sensuous spectacle of the belle époque is shadowed by racial and social tensions. Street demos are rampant. Anti-Semites vie with the defenders of justice and the rights of man. Scientists propose hereditary explanations for the rise and rise of murder, madness and nervous disorders. The police force is embattled, exposed in a scandal-mongering press. How can they keep the order citizens want, if their accusers champion the individual liberties of even prostitutes and criminals?In the midst of all this, the body of a beautiful woman is found in the Seine. Her corpse is not the first to turn up in river or canal or subway shaft. But she has a name. She is the performer, Olympe Fabre. She is also Rachel Arnhem, a young Jewish woman, whom gossip, back in Boston, has linked to one of its favourite prodigals, Rafael Norton.James Norton, his elder brother, is charged with the task of bringing Raf and their high-spirited, though ailing sister, Ellie, home from the hotbed of vice and murderous entanglements. It is a mission he confronts reluctantly. He and Paris have a history - not altogether unlinked to the turbulent present which now confronts him. A gripping psychological period thriller, reminiscent of Caleb Carr, PARIS REQUIEM has Lisa Appignanesi writing in top, chilling form.

MacArthur and Co 2001

How well does anyone know their best friend?When investigative journalist Isabel Morgan vanishes, her colleagues and lovers see this as just another gambit in her ever dramatic life. But her closest friend, Leo Holland, a Manhattan cartoonist, is filled with a sense of dread: something terrible has happened to Isabel. She is more certain of this than of much else in a life that is teetering close to the edge. In desperation, she flies to London to trace the woman she realizes has become her sustaining force.Convinced that Isabel's disappearance is tied in some way to the genetically modified substances she has been investigating and that her analyst holds the keys to her whereabouts, Leo masquerades as a potential patient. In the process, she discovers more than she set out to know. Danger, in Isabel's secret world, comes in many guises. `A superior and thoroughly absorbing psychological thriller.' Good Book Guide`I stayed up until 3 am reading right through.'

Toronto Globe & Mail Published by Bantam Books, 2000; paperback 2001

MacArthur & Company, Canada

Pygmalion, France, as Le Divan des Morts under the pen name Lisa Rivers

Aufbau Verlag, Germany, etc

A deranged assassin has gunned down fourteen women students in Montreal. Celebrated Actress, Madeleine Blais, is haunted by a sense that somewhere out there, where her filmed image roams so freely, someone is determined to kill her too. Her old friend and lawyer, Pierre Rousseau can do nothing to shift her growing despair. So when on Christmas morning she is found hanging in a barn close to her grandmother's cottage in the small Laurentian town of Ste-Anne, the obvious verdict is that Madeleine's depression has driven her to suicide. Only her grandmother's unshakeable belief in Madeleine's love of life induces the police to launch a murder investigation, in which Pierre, with secrets of his own to hide, takes a leading role.`Appignanesi paces the mounting emotional atmosphere beautifully… The Dead of Winter becomes, gradually and grippingly, not just the tale of a search for a woman's killer, but an exploration of obsession and guilt that leads to a shocking conclusion.' The Times`A deductive, pacey narrative with plenty of complex characterisation and psychology. At its pivot is sexual obsession and, of course, murder. A confident, well-handled and moodily atmospheric exercise in the suspension of disbelief.' Mail on Sunday`Not the least of Appignanesi's achievements is to convincingly render the male point of view of her protagonist and narrator…. A considerable achievment.' Guardian`A chilling study in male obsession.'

MacLean'sBantam 1998, paperback, 1999

MacArthur & company, Canada.

Translated into German and French

Cambridge. Tessa and Stephen's marriage is quietly foundering. She wants a baby: she doesn't mind how. Stephen refuses to talk about it. Tessa can't think about anything else.When Stephen leaves for a conference on the new genetics in Paris, Tessa - impulsively, uncharacteristically - decides to folow the trail left by a seductive voice on the ansaphone.Tracking Stephen, Tessa blunders into a world of new desires and old debts, a mysterious network of contacts, overt and covert, from Paris to Prague, through which information has been disseminated since Cold War days. But now the poliltical barriers are down, free enterprise is sweeping the scientific community. Information is power. And Stephen is a principal player in the emerging - though sometimes no less violent - order.As frontiers shift - geographic, scientific, personal - so does the balance between the sexes. The things we do for love become more unpredictable than passion itself. Part thriller, part romance, The Things We Do for Love, is also a disturbing psychological take on what lies behind the boy's own spy story.

Published by HarperCollins 1997; paperback 1998

Ominbus Edition with A Good Woman 1998

Maria d'Este is beautiful, effortlessly so. Her seductive power has attracted men and success in equal measure. In most ordinary women's lives, she is the dreaded `other woman'. But now she has been brought face to face with the destructive side of her allure - and begins to realise the price is too high.Leaving the maelstrom of New York behind her, Maria returns to Paris, the city of her birth, to start over again. Now, she is determined, it will be different - that like her childhood friend, Beatrice, she will be good. But as she enters the world of the law in quest of women who murder, good and bad turn out to be unnervingly blurred. And once again her fatal charm is poised to damage.`Rivetting, thrilling, sexy, intelligent.' Evening Standard

Published by HarperCollins 1996; paperback 1997

Translated into French as Une Femme Exemplaire (Belfond, 1998; J'ai Lu, 2000)

German as Die andere Frau (Aufau Taschenbuch 2001)

An epic story of dangerous passions and equally dangerous purities…London. Max Bergmann, charismatic leader of the environmental movement, has vanished without trace and is feared dead. Campaigning journalist, Helena Latimer, sets off to search for him. What she finds instead of the man who has embodied her dreams is a turbulent history which draws her present into its vortex.Germany 1913. In an idyllic lakeside house outside Munich, two aritocratic Viennese sisters pass the summer which is to transfigure their lives. Bettina, the elder, is a woman of chaste principles and rigorous intellectual honesty, leavened only by wit. Her sister Anna is still an innocent, happy in dreams of forthcoming marriage. Neither is prepared for the arrival of Johannes Bahr, a young painter as wildly experimental in his passions as in his art. Through the upheavals of the Great War and the excesses of 1920's Berlin to the emergence of the Nazis, these three play out their loves and loyalties and watch their children hold up a distorting mirror to their lives and ideals. It is the next generation which will look back in wonder to sift the lessons of that dark history. Appignanesi has drawn on her deep knowledge of 20th century European history to create a thoroughly absorbing novel about fathers, fatherlands and the fantasies which feed them.`If you're searching for that ultimate treat, an enthralling novel that won't insult your intelligence, then Lisa Appignanesi should be just the ticket.' Kate Saunders

HarperCollins 1994, paperback 1995

Dutton/NAL, New York, 1995

Translated into Swedish, Dutch, etc.

1934 Strolling through Paris streets, Dr. Jacob Jardine glimpses a figure from his deepest imaginings. She is Sylvie Kowalska, part temptress, part innocent child. Despite himself, he is drawn into her troubled world - one which casts Sylvie, first as the darling of surrealist Bohemia, and when war erupts, as a member of the Resistance. Thriving on danger and only on danger, Sylvie weaves a web of memory and desire which entangles lives across two generations and two continents. 1980 Filmmaker Alexei Gismondi is trailing an elegant woman in the New York rain. Katherine Jardine has cast off her European heritage. Alexei's intrusion into her life forces her to face a past and a mother she would rather forget. He is obsessed with a thirty-five year old mystery. A mystery to which he believes Katherine holds the key. At its centre is Sylvie, whose enigma still burns. Her legacy, born out of the chaos of post-war Europe, is double edged indeed…`A superbly plotted saga of passion and heartbreak. Appignanesi will keep you guessing until the last full stop.' Cosmopolitan`A thinking woman's blockbuster.' Observer`A monumental novel… intelligent and well-written. Appignanesi's tight plotting and confident style make this a superior version of the blockbuster.' Sunday Times

HarperCollins 1991, paperback, 1992

Dutton NAL - New York 1992 Translated into French, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Russian, Croatian