Series: P.S.

Lucky Girls is a collection of five stories, set in India and Southeast Asia, narrated by young women who find themselves face to face with the compelling circumstances of adult love. Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways-and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to landscapes and cultures that are strange to them.

In `Lucky Girls,' an American woman who has been involved in five-year affair with an Indian man feels bound, after his death, to her memories of him, and to her adopted country. The protagonist of `Outside the Eastern Gate' returns to her childhood home in Delhi, where her mother, years before, abandoned the family for a dangerous journey across the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. And in "Letter from the Last Bastion," a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a middle-aged novelist, who confides in her the secret truth of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. Lucky Girls marks the arrival of a writer whose clarity of intellect and emotion set her among today's most gifted and exciting young voices.

The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

Published 15 August 2006

From the award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity and the shining chaos of everyday American life. Yuan Zho, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one year's artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone -- his past links with the radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes. 'Freudenberger is most certainly the genuine article.' Guardian 'Freudenberger's novel unfolds into that rare thing, a work of poetics itself, a medication in art. The fact that she does it with such wit and compassion, such generosity of mind and heart, is miraculous.' T he Times 'A fiercely intelligent first novel ...Lots of sharp, funny dialogue, it has something of a Lost in Translation feel.
' Eve Magazine 'Written in prose as clear as birdsong, the novel grips from first to last.' Scotland on Sunday