In this luminous novel from the award-winning author of The Dutch House and Bel Canto, a gay magician’s devoted assistant and widow must confront her husband’s troubling past as she comes to meet his family for the first time.
A magician (with one memorable appearance on the Johnny Carson Show to his credit) takes the name Parsifal. He is gay. He has a Vietnamese lover, Phan. When Phan dies of AIDS, Parsifal marries the woman who has always adored him and who has lived with them both, his assistant Sabine.
Then Parsifal himself dies in California, suddenly and shockingly, of an aneurysm. Parsifal always said that he had no living family and that he came from wealthy upscale Connecticut stock. The reality is very different, as Sabine learns from his lawyer. He came from a poor Nebraska family and they are very much alive. Indeed his mother and sister are on their way to California to meet Sabine, the daughter- and sister-in-law they know nothing about. It is bad that her husband has died. What Sabine must now cope with is coming to terms with his horrific past and the reason he divorced himself from his family and roots.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9781857028157
Number of pages: 368
Weight: 260 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 23 mm
‘Original, sparkling, funny and sad – a book you read in one gulp and want to revisit immediately’ Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph ‘A delicate exploration of impossible love and new-found friendship’ Guardian ‘The kindliness of The Magician's Assistant is beguiling, and Patchett is an adroit, graceful writer’ Suzanne Berne, New York Times Book Review
The novel begins with the death of Parsifal, the magician of the title, with his ‘assistant’ and wife, Sabine by his side. However, this was a marriage between a gay man and a woman who had adored him for the previous... More
Magic!
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