Euphoria (Thorndike Press Large Print Core) - Hardcover

This dazzling novel bites like a tropical insect, and makes anthropology seem more exciting than any other profession (Emma Donogue, author of ROOM)

Euphoria offers a brilliant reimagining of Mead's pioneering exploits . . . Most striking about Euphoria is the expertly weighted interplay between Mead's expedition and King's free-roaming imagination. Although the reality is thinly veiled it offers a volatile triangle for King to fill with an alternate history . . . The use of Stone's journal as a counterpoint to Bankson's perspective adds potency to his internalised affection for her, and it is King's ability to construct this latent passion, and the strain it places on Fen, that tantalises the reader so effectively . . . for periods in Euphoria it feels as if you are there, on the banks of the Sepik River, ready to strike out for the frontier and grapple with cultural understanding. Then you realise that King is expressing only what might have occurred, rather than what did. However, the artfulness of her characterisation is so adept that her prose has the force of truth. (Daily Telegraph)

Jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful (Paula McLain, author of THE PARIS WIFE)

Euphoria is a meticulously researched homage to Mead's restless mind . . . it's also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace . . . The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic . . . In King's exquisite book, desire - for knowledge, fame, another person - is only fleetingly rewarded (New York Times)

There are some novels that take you by the hand with their lovely prose alone; there are those that pull you in with sensual renderings of time and place and a compelling story; and there are still others that seduce you solely with their subject matter. But it is a rare novel indeed that does all of the above at once and with complete artistic mastery. Yet this is precisely what Lily King has done . . . Euphoria is simply one of the finest novels I've read in years (Andre Dubus III, author of HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG)

Dramatic, insightful and absorbing . . . she captures the amber of one man's exquisite longing for a woman who changed the way we look at ourselves (Washington Post)

I have come to expect Lily King's nuanced explorations of the human heart, but in this novel she pulled me in to the exotic world of a woman anthropologist working with undiscovered tribes in 1930s New Guinea and I was totally captivated (Karl Marlantes, author of MATTERHORN)

Persuasive and evocative . . . Finely crafted . . . it shows a talented writer unwilling to settle for what she already does well and eager to give herself new challenges; her ambition is laudable (Los Angeles Times)

From Conrad to Kingsolver, the misdeeds of Westerners have inspired their own literary subgenre, and in King's insightful, romantic addition, the work of novelist and anthropologist find resonant parallel: In the beauty and cruelty of others, we discover our own (Vogue)

Thrilling . . . intense, seductive, sexual, and intellectual . . . It's grit-in-your-teeth sensuous (San Francisco Chronicle)

Three young anthropologists in the 1930s are caught in a passionate love triangle . . .