Lulu in Marrakech »

A two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Diane Johnson has drawn comparisons to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton with her comedies of manners about Americans living and loving abroad.

Lulu Sawyer arrives in Marrakech, Morocco, hoping to rekindle her romance with a worldly Englishman, Ian Drumm. It's the perfect cover for her assignment with the American CIA: tracing the flow of money from well-heeled donors to radical Islamic groups. While spending her days poolside and her nights at lively dinner parties, Lulu observes the fragile coexistence of two cultures that, if not clashing yet, have begun to show signs of fracture. Beneath the surface of this polite expatriate community lies a more sinister world laced not only with double standards, but with double agents. The more Lulu immerses herself in the workings of Marrakech, the more questions emerge; when bombs explode, the danger is palpable.

"Like Jane Austen [Diane Johnston] steps out of the frame to anatomize her characters with sudden insight; like Virginia Woolf she creeps back in to record their inappropriate thoughts--and their consternation at having them." -- Newsweek


From...

The Barnes & Noble Review

"I am determined not to let ideology, whether of love or patriotism, get the better of me again." So says the eponymous heroine of Lulu in Marrakech, the 15th novel from the prolific Diane Johnson. With novels such as Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L'Affaire, Johnson has long established a mastery of the comedy of manners, particularly as a consequence of culture clash among American expats, the French, and the English. In a move likely to take longtime readers off guard, Johnson has upped the ante in this book, exploring a fictional mileu -- a tale of espionage in the post-9/11 era. Her star: a not-very-savvy spy who struggles to resolve two missions, one on behalf of U.S. national security, the other, a matter of romantic insecurity.