Foreign Bodies

Presents a retelling of Henry James's "The Ambassadors" that follows the efforts of divorced schoolteacher Bea Nightingale to navigate a turbulent year spent with her estranged brother's family.

Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel, she retraces Henry James’s The Ambassadors and delivers a brilliant, utterly new American classic.

At the center of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of his family. Over the course of a few months she travels from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, and finally facing her ex-husband to shake off his lingering sneers from decades past. As she inadvertently wreaks havoc in their lives, every one of them is irrevocably changed.

“Raucous, funny, ferocious, and tragic. A literary master, as James was, Ozick makes all those qualities fit together seamlessly, and with heartbreaking effect.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“An absorbing achievement… A nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called ‘the real thing.’” —New York Times Book Review

“Dazzling, even masterful.” —Entertainment Weekly