Inn at Lake Devine

by Elinor Lipman

Published 19 May 1998
In this comic romance it's the early 1960s and Natalie Marx is stunned when her mother receives this response to enquires about vacation accomodation in Vermont: 'Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.' So begins Natalie's fixation with the Inn and the family who owns it. 'It was not complicated , and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: they had a hotel; they didn't want Jews; we were Jews...' Natalie Marx is stunned to discover the Inn at Lake Devine in Vermont , a hotel operating an anti-semitic policy. She becomes obsessed with the Inn and the family that owns it, and finagles an invitation to join a friend on vacation there. In this way she sets herself on a path that will inextricably link her adult life to this peculiar family and their once-restricted hotel. This novel delights with its elegant and deft story-telling and sparkling characters: even when anti-Semitism rears its head in Vermont and the tables are turned in the Catskills. Elinor Lipman is the undisputed master of the art of screwball comedy, and The Inn at Lake Devine is a wonderfully satisfying, witty, romantic comedy.

Ladies' Man

by Elinor Lipman

Published 15 June 1999
A straight-talking comic novel with a silver-tongued anti-hero, The Ladies' Man introduces the Dobbin sisters, attractive red-headed spinsters Adele, Lois and Kathleen. Their lives are thrown into disarray by the re-appearance of Nash Harvey, Adele's erstwhile fiance, who deserted her thirty years ago on the evening of their engagement party. The re-appearance of Nash Harvey on the doorstep of the spinster Dobbin sisters, thirty years after he deserted Adele Dobbin on the evening of their engagement party, is the opening of this superb romantic comedy. Debonnaire and pathalogically unreliable, Nash Harvey will soon discover that scorned women do not make gracious hostesess. It's not just Adele who's upset by this incorrigible ladies' man: Lois -- the only sister who ever married, to a man she swiftly divorced after finding out his penchant for women's clothes -- has always had a crush on Nash. And could it be coincidence that Kathleen finds herself propelled, after all these single years, into the arms of Lorenz, the doorman of the building where she runs a lingerie store? Full of wit, mischief and elegance, The Ladies' Man is the work of a brilliant comic novelist.