Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness - Hardcover

"A triumph. Kohler brings the whole fascinating and terrible period of the French Revolution and its aftermath to life--more graceful, more searching, more truly dramatic than most current fiction." -- Lyndall Gordon

"Sheila Kohler is a writer's writer. Her cult admires her for her crisp style, her large conception of the novel, her virtuosity. Bluebird is a page-turner saga. . . . Fiction is seldom written about practical, competent people; this novel is an ode to the half-Irish Lucy Dillon, the woman who had it all." -- Edmund White

"A beautiful, authentic, intelligent, and page-turning story...a feast for the senses." -- Amy Tan "Elegant...exquisite." -- Time Out New York ""Sheila Kohler brings her courageous and resourceful heroine vividly to life in a stirring story of revolutionary times." -J. M. Coetzee "Enchanting...Kohler's elegant, clearly written prose conjures a heroine whose enthusiasm for life and learning is infectious, and whose disarming manner is immensely appealing." -Booklist "A radiant, sweeping book...marvelously readable." -Elizabeth Strout "Bluebird is a page-turner saga." -Edmund White "Sheila Kohler hitches her sensory-rich prose to a really good story: that of Lucy Dillon, an aristocrat (based on a real person) in Marie Antoinette's court." -More magazine

"Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness" is a radiant and artful novel based on the life of Lucy Dillon, an 18th-century French aristocrat. Her intelligence, beauty, and lack of pretension made Lucy a favorite of luminaries like Talleyrand and Germaine de Stael - and equipped her to survive the "Terror" that swept France in the wake of the Revolution. Possessed of considerable wit and practicality, Lucy manages to keep her beloved husband and small children safe while all her former circle, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, are guillotined. Eventually securing passage on a small ship bound for Boston, Lucy and her family settle in the Hudson Valley near Albany. Exhilarated by the personal and political freedom she finds in America, Lucy views her time there not as "exile," but rather as "opportunity" - and the former palace darling proudly turns dairymaid, establishing a successful farm and embracing all the challenges and adventures the New World presents her.