About this item
From "one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America" (Michael Schaub, NPR) , a historical saga about love, class, and the past we never escape.The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 with Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamiting the breakwater at Laurelton Hall -- his fantastical mansion with its columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and the smokestack hidden in a blue-banded minaret -- so as to foil the town reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes both the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany's prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks behind which Randall, her brother, is playing. Nearly a century later, Prudence receives an unexpected visit from Grace, a hospice nurse and the granddaughter of Randall, who Prudence never saw again after he stowed away on a train to California.
About the Author
Lisa Gornick has been hailed by NPR as "one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America...immensely talented and brave." She is the author of 4 novels: THE PEACOCK FEAST, LOUISA MEETS BEAR, and TINDERBOX--all published by Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Picador; and A PRIVATE SORCERY, published by Algonquin. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Real Simple, and Slate. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute. A longtime New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan with her family.
