I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS - Couverture souple

"His hand is growing cold, still she holds it" is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night, as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—of events that occurred in places as distant and disparate as France, Wisconsin, Hong Kong, Mexico and California, Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets and overwhelming joys that shaped the lives of Nina and Philip.

Slender, potent and utterly engaging, I Married You for Happiness is not only a moving elegy to a man and a marriage, but also a meditation on the theory of probability and how chance can affect both a life and one’s consideration of the possibility of an afterlife.

Born in Paris, LILY TUCK is the author of four previous novels: Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up; The Woman Who Walked on Water; Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and The News from Paraguay, winner of theNational Book Award. She is also the author of the biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and are collected in Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived. Lily Tuck divides her time between Maine and New York City.