Books like Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

Virginia "Vinnie" Miner, a fifty‑something, unmarried, tenured professor recently on sabbatical, arrives in London to research children’s folk rhymes. Though she carries a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels deeply English and looks down on her fellow Americans while wrestling with a mortifying yet oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist whose attire evokes a Western cowboy more than a gentleman. Meanwhile, her colleague Fred Turner—a handsome, flat‑broke, newly separated young man—struggles to concentrate on his own research amid the chaos of being a British expatriate. He is distracted by an unpredictable English actress whose presence embodies the alluring world from which he feels detached. Both American and abroad, Vinnie and Fred confront loneliness and cultural displacement. Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize‑winning novel captures their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons with wit, poignancy, and sharp observation, making it an enduring comic masterpiece of expatriate academia.

First publish date: 1984