Lore Segal

Five close friends in their 90s meet— as they have for decades— for their monthly 'ladies lunch', to puzzle, and laugh at, the enigmas and affronts of ageing. When one of their number is placed unhappily in a home, the others conspire to spring her. Lore Segal's witty, yet poignant, short story, Ladies' Lunch, appeared in the New Yorker in...

Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but elective cousins. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to - a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares...

Nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria, 600 Jewish children assembled at Vienna station to board the first of the Kindertransports bound for Britain. Among them was 10-year-old Lore Segal. For the next seven years, she lived as a refugee in other people's houses, moving from the Orthodox Levines in Liverpool, to the staunchly working-class Hoopers in Kent, to...

A fortieth-anniversary edition of the unforgettable, eccentric "truly original novel" (Newsday), an evocative tale of race, romance, and the complexities of the human-experience, by the Pulitzer Prize finalistShe's Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, newly arrived in the United States. He's Carter Bayoux, her first American: a middle-aged, hard-drinking Black intellectual. At first, their relationship is fueled...

Following her acclaimed Ladies' Lunch novella (2023), Lore Segal continued to create stories about a fictional group of nonagenarian friends as they faced the last years, months, and moments of their lives. For Lore Segal, the importance lay in 'still talking', and still writing to the very end. Fittingly, her last story was published in the New Yorker in the...

From the acclaimed author of Her First American, a 'charming novel disguised as a book of short stories,' (The New York Times Book Review) exploring belonging, connection, intimacy, and self-acceptance. The thirteen interconnected stories of Shakespeare's Kitchen capture the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring seven short...