In this searing debut novel, for readers of Katie Kitamura and Rachel Cusk, an obsessive first love affair and its tragic aftermath decades later brings one woman's life in New York and pursuit of art into searing focus.
Julienne falls in love with Gaspar in college and spends her twenties with him, but their love affair ends tragically. Told in short passages that span decades, this patently international story follows Julienne to New York, London, China, Germany, and elsewhere.
Julienne's tragic affair with Gaspar becomes a window into her own relationship to the cosmopolitan identity she's developed over time as an escape from her painful, unglamorous upbringing in South Jersey. Julienne also investigates the mystery of her own birth in the novel, by trying to discover if the fantastic story of a brief affair her mother had while working as a stewardess on an international flight could possibly be true.
Ultimately, “Thieving Sun” is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, social mobility, debt, and the danger of using others to define our selves.
