Make a date with Alison Lurie’s tales of adultery

The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist’s campus romps make her the feminist David Lodge

At the Budleigh Salterton literary festival last month, I talked to Hilary Mantel about the books she holds most dear. On her list were Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, a marvellous novel from 1981 about an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in which nothing is as it seems. She also told the audience of her fondness for the singular Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose books Edwardian types behave badly at dinner, and for the funny campus romps of the American writer Alison Lurie.

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