A nomadic up-bringing, traveling through North America and Europe, made Alexandra Whitaker a perpetual ‘new girl’ who developed survival skills of observation and mimicry that would later prove to be useful writing tools. Necessity also made her a keen language learner. She speaks a few languages well, and a few more in a slap-dash way.
Elder daughter of the internationally best-selling writer Trevanian, she collaborated with him on various projects over the years. She has settled down at last in Spain and France, with her British husband, A. N. Kennedy and their daughter. She writes fiction, and runs a one-room hotel for solitary travelers.
Leaving Sophie Dean, which has been called, "A Manual for Dealing with an Erring Husband", is being published by Grand Central Publishing, (New York), on March 26, 2012.
Also in France by Les Presses de la Cité, (Paris)
Also in Turkey by E YAYINLARI. (Istanbul)
Take a look on Amazon and pre-order for at a discount
and on Barnes and Noble with similar pre-order discount
or in your local independent book store.
"Other
men left their families. Other men packed their bags and walked
away. How was it that Adam Dean found himself, eleven days
after his
supposed departure in his one great bid for happiness, a prisoner in
suburbia, shackled to his children, on his knees, dusting with a soft cloth?"
Adam and Sophie Dean’s marriage might easily have lasted forever. They could have spent their lives making the best of its mixture of satisfaction and affection, resignation and melancholy. But a complex series of events topples them into divorce.
What they say:
"A lively, cosmopolitan novel...Whitaker writes with style and aplomb, a sense of fun, and a sense of humanity."
Elin Hilderbrand, author of Silver Girl.
"Succeeds brilliantly as a comedy of manners because of Whitaker's pitch-perfect depictions of human foibles and graceful renderings of awkward siutuations. But the book works on a much deeper level, too: as a meditation on marriage, solitude, personal freedom and parenting that is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining."
Meg Mitchell Moore, author of The Arrivals, and So Far Away.
"Smart, clever, moving, and surprising at every turn. Funny and wise, this is a tale of modern love about parents who love their children more than they don't love each other."
Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry and Piece of Work.
"There are countless books about divorce, about a man having an affair and leaving his wife. Leaving Sophie Dean is unusual in that the husband is not permitted to walk out on the wife.
The novel explores what would happen if a divorcing couple really did act ‘in the children’s best interests’, instead of just paying lip service to that notion.
Some of the ideas are drawn from a non-fiction work by Sylvette Desmeuzes-Balland, Le Divorce Vécu par les Enfants (Plon, Paris, 1993) in which children of divorced parents explain what they liked and disliked about the way their parents split up.
It struck me that these children's view of an ideal divorce isn’t impossible to put into practice – all it requires is a degree of maturity and a sincere desire to spare the children unnecessary pain – but we need to know about it. And how better to share that than in a work of fiction?"
Houghton Mifflin, 1986
Alexandra Whitaker is currently working on a new novel, and editing Trevanian's magnum opus, Street of the Four Winds
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