Moon Tiger

Claudia Hampton is dying in a hospital bed, and announces to a nurse who is not listening that she intends to write a history of the world. What she produces instead is her own, told in fragments and revisited from other people's angles, because Claudia does not believe in a single point of view and will not pretend to one. She was a popular historian, combative, vain, and unmoved by the disapproval of the men she outwrote. She had a brother, Gordon, whom she loved with an intensity nobody in the family was comfortable with, a daughter, Lisa, whom she failed, and a lover, Jasper, whom she never much liked. And in Egypt in 1942, as a war correspondent, she met a tank officer named Tom Southern, and had a few months, and then did not. Lively cuts between decades without warning and replays scenes from a second consciousness, so that the reader watches Claudia be misunderstood in real time. The moon tiger of the title is a coil of mosquito repellent burning down through a Cairo night, and the image carries the whole book: a life consuming itself into ash while the reader watches.