An Absence of Cousins: A Novel

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 – the institute’s director and his wry, acerbic wife – hold the key?In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. Includes the acclaimed New Yorker podcast story, “The Reverse Bug”.

Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928 and escaped to England age ten on the Kindertransport. She moved to the USA after the war and has been writing stories for the New Yorker since 1958. Last year, aged 95, she was elected to the US Academy of Arts and Letters. Sort Of also publish her Other People’s Houses 9781908745750 and Ladies’ Lunch 9781914502033