Lily Tuck Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up → The Woman Who Walked on Water → Siam, or The Woman Who Shot a Man
If you want the award-winning historical novel first: The News from Paraguay → The Rest Is Memory
If you prefer intimate relationship stories: I Married You for Happiness → Sisters
If you want the most personal books: The Double Life of Liliane → Woman of Rome
If you want short fiction: Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived → The House at Belle Fontaine → Heathcliff Redux

Lily Tuck was born in Paris in 1938, to German parents, just as Europe was sliding toward war. Because the family was of Jewish heritage, they left Europe after war was declared. Her father joined the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, while she and her mother lived first in Peru and then Uruguay. After the war they reunited in Paris, but not for long. Soon she was in New York with her mother, spending summers with her father in Italy.

That early life, split across countries, languages, and households, left her with the feeling of rootlessness that runs through so much of her fiction.

Tuck was an only child, and she has said books and imagination became company during years of moving and changing schools. She studied English at Radcliffe, later earned a master's degree in American literature at the Sorbonne, and in the early 1960s lived in Bangkok with her first husband. Thailand stayed with her, and so did the habit of watching how people behave when they are far from home.

She came to print later than many novelists.

In the 1970s she began a novel based on the disappearance of Jim Thompson, whom she had known in Southeast Asia, and worked on it for years without getting it published. She kept writing stories, translating from French, and slowly finding her shape. A decisive turn came in 1988, when she joined Gordon Lish's workshop in New York. Lish became an important mentor, and three years later, at 53, Tuck published her first novel, Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up.

That debut, built almost entirely from a late-night phone call about a friend's bizarre death, already showed what readers would come to expect from Tuck: compression, unease, dry humor, and a sharp ear for evasion. The Woman Who Walked on Water sends a suburban woman to India in search of spiritual meaning. Siam, or The Woman Who Shot a Man, a PEN/Faulkner finalist, draws on Tuck's time in Thailand and turns an expat marriage into a story of mystery, privilege, and danger.

Her best-known novel is The News from Paraguay, which won the National Book Award in 2004. Using the story of Ella Lynch and Francisco Solano Lopez, it moves between love story and political disaster, and it shows Tuck at her widest historical scale. Even there, her deepest interest stays personal: women who cross borders, people misreading each other, and private desire colliding with history.

Loss matters in her work, and in her life. After her husband Edward Tuck died in 2002, she found herself unable to write fiction for a time and turned instead to biography, producing Woman of Rome, her book on Elsa Morante, which won the Premio Elsa Morante. Later books kept widening the frame: I Married You for Happiness compresses a long marriage into one sleepless night, The Double Life of Liliane folds family history into fiction, and The Rest Is Memory imagines the brief life of a Polish girl imprisoned at Auschwitz.

Her short fiction is just as important. Collections such as Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, The House at Belle Fontaine, and Heathcliff Redux return to the themes that define her work: displacement, secrecy, betrayal, desire, and the strange clarity that can come when a life is slightly off balance. Tuck has long divided her time between New York City and Maine, and her work still carries the same alert, intimate feeling that marked it from the start.