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Start giftingIsabel’s Bed
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWhen Harriet Mahoney first saw it, Isabel Krug’s bed was covered in sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. The unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted Harriet had fled wintry Manhattan in response to a mysterious ad in the New York Review of Books: “Book in progress? Why not share my Cape Cod retreat? Roomy and peaceful—your life will be your own.”
In a room with a view atop a Truro dune, Harriet starts on a different path to fulfillment by ghostwriting The Isabel Krug Story, based on the sexy blonde’s tabloid past—specifically, a nasty night in Greenwich, Connecticut, when Guy Van Vleet died and Isabel lived to tell about it. Unusually talented in the man department, Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all. Life according to Isabel is a soap-opera extravaganza, an experience to be swallowed whole—and the attitude is catching.
Elinor Lipman is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Inn at Lake Devine and My Latest Grievance, winner of the Paterson Fiction Prize. In 2001 she won the New England Book Award for Fiction. The film Then She Found Me, directed by and starring Helen Hunt, is based on her first novel.
Grace Conlin (1962–1997) was the recording name of Grainne Cassidy, an award-winning actress and acclaimed narrator. She was a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and won a Helen Hayes Award in 1988 for her role in Woolly Mammoth’s production of Savage in Limbo.
Reviews
“Ms. Lipman takes on the question of how women and men, in and out of love and jail, should treat each other. In the end, her comic soap opera outsings her dramatic love story…Surely this would be criminal, were we not enjoying ourselves so thoroughly along the way…Isabel’s Bed is serious entertainment.”
“By about page ten of this novel, the reader gets a…grin on his face, and that grin doesn’t really stop for about a week.”
“A marvelous, quirky novel that makes you want to read it straight through without looking up.”
“If Jane Austen had been born about two centuries later…chances are she’d have written like Elinor Lipman…One of the last of the urbane romantics.”
“Delightful…Engaging…The perfect companion…After a short while, these characters become more vivid than one’s own friends.”
“A warm, affecting tale about one smart woman letting go of her dumb choices and fumbling toward love.”
“Conlin’s silky voice captures Harriet’s shy hesitancy, her persistently low self-esteem as well as Isabel’s brash, busty blond self-confidence…Outstanding reading.”
“Isabel’s Bed gives us the intricate and deft plot, crisp dialogue and unexpected twists and turns we have come to expect in the comic novels of Elinor Lipman.”
“With her trademark, light comic touch, Lipman unfolds her narrative…The unexpected ending offers a just-right finish to this wry, warm story of about love and those who practice it.”
“Lipman has written another winner…full of zany twists.”
“A delightful, gentle, knowing satire of writers, the publishing and entertainment industries, the art world, and the vagaries of love.”
“So well paced that you could devour it in one sitting, but so much fun that you'll regret finishing so quickly if you do.”
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