Reviews
Alexis Schaitkin has created two unforgettable characters whose lives intertwine over decades and continents in a riveting story of secrets, memories, heartbreak, and resilience: a book within a book for the ages. Two Lives is a dazzling and deeply moving novel from one of America's premier literary talents
Alexis Schaitkin has accomplished something brilliant and rare in this novel that bridges two eras while feeling wholly alive in the present. Written with grace, humor, and a fierce intelligence, Two Lives interrogates memory and the uneasy work of reconciling the lives we remember with the lives others remember for us. I don't think I'll ever stop thinking about this marvel of a book
Two Lives is a story of unparalleled intimacy. The love between Evelyn and Simon defies categorization, as does the secret they alone carry. Alexis Schaitkin's writing is stunning, as is her unerring commitment to summoning characters in their totality. I read with my heart in my throat. Unforgettable
In a time defined by cruelty, how can a child - or an octogenarian, for that matter - make sense of a stranger's kindness? Alexis Schaitkin never gives in to sentiment, which is precisely what makes this masterful, morally complex story so moving in the end
Two Lives is at once a wryly penetrating portrait of ageing in general, the Jewish version in south Florida in particular, and a cultural anthropology of the American upper middle class; a heartbreaking page-turner on the accidents of fate, the tragedies of the Kindertransport, and the way children deal with trauma by choosing to neither know nor wonder; and a consideration of both the solaces and limitations of a life spent pilfering from experience in the service of one's art