Foreign Bodies

Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel, she retells Henry James's"The Ambassadors"and delivers a brilliant, utterly new American classic.
At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage.When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of his family. Over the course of a few months she travels from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, and finally facing her ex-husband and shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past. As she inadvertely wreaks havoc in their lives, every one of them is irrevocably changed.