The English Teacher

by Lily King
Fiction. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Publication: September 2005
256 pp.

By the author of the highly acclaimed, award-winning debut, The Pleasing Hour, a riveting portrait of a haunted single mother and her teenage son

Unanimously praised for her first novel, The Pleasing Hour, which was called “splendid . . . powerful . . . [and] so assured it’s hard to believe the book itself is her debut” by The New York Times Book Review, Lily King has written a thrilling successor. In THE ENGLISH TEACHER, King uses her superb craftsmanship, effortlessly suspenseful pacing, and tenderly observed insight into marriage, motherhood, and family to expertly limn the life of an independent single mother and her fifteen-year-old son, who is on a circuitous path toward a truth she has long concealed from him.

Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer Academy. She has since become a fixture and one of the best English teachers Fayer has ever had. By living on campus, on an island off the New England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. For years she has lived largely through the books she teaches, but when she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. Peter, however, welcomes the changes. Excited to move off campus, eager to have siblings at last, Peter anticipates a regular life with a “normal” family. But the Belou children are still grieving, and the memory of their recently dead mother exerts a powerful hold on the house. As Vida begins teaching her signature book, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a nineteenth-century tale of an ostracized woman and social injustice, its themes begin to echo eerily in her own life and Peter sees that the mother he perceived as indomitable is collapsing and it is up to him to help.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty, family, and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her award-winning debut, THE ENGLISH TEACHER confirms Lily King as one of the most accomplished and vibrant young voices of today.

Advance Praise:
“A marriage of single parents is more often the stuff of sitcoms than of serious novels, but King uses it to great effect in this intense character study. . . . King renders Vida’s seething withholding in a free, direct style that captures everything . . . She’s also excellent on the children’s reactions to each other as the households come together and then separate, dramatically and perhaps permanently.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Lily King writes equally movingly and beautifully about both the large, dramatic and the small, seemingly inconsequential acts that destroy and define family.”—Lily Tuck, Winner of the National Book Award for The News From Paraguay

“King delicately delves into the fragile bonds holding families together, even when logic favors their dissolution . . . [She] writes with subtle clarity, displaying an intuitive understanding of the vulnerable psyches of teenagers, and with pinpoint perception of her characters’ inner lives.”—Booklist

“King beautifully delineates the grieving children in all their confused steps toward recovery.”—Kirkus Reviews


About the author:
LILY KING studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University, where she won the Raymond Carver Prize for fiction. A MacDowell Colony fellow, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. Her first novel, The Pleasing Hour was a BookSense selection, a New York Times Notable Book, won the B&N Discover Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives with her family in Maine.

Previous publishers include: UK/Little Brown, Holland/Ambo/Anthos; Germany/Suhrkamp;
US Paperback/Simon & Schuster