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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, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

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, author of Fanny: A Fiction

"The life of Lucy Dillon, an aristocrat in Marie Antoinette's court, is the subject of the seventh novel and flawed first foray into historical realism for South African author Kohler (Crossways). Through her resilience and resourcefulness, Lucy (based on the real-life Henriette Lucy Dillon) saves her husband, Frdric Sraphin, and their children from the Terror during the French Revolution. The book opens in 1794 with Lucy and her family fleeing France, then flashes back episodically to her role as apprentice lady-in-waiting at court and her severe childhood despite her aristocratic privilege. The contradictions in her upbringing, the novel suggests, may have helped Lucy to become the resourceful person who could lead her family to the U.S. and establish a dairy farm in upstate New York, where her friendliness and butter become renowned. But two years later, once the Terror ends, Frdric insists they return to France, though her time in America remains the moment when she lived out 'the illusion... of being Queen of my own destiny.' Kohler's writing is often deft, but the immense amount of historical material checks the narrative momentum. The novel succeeds better in conveying the particulars of Lucy's life, especially her adaptation to the rigors of American country life." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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.

Sheila Kohler is the author of six previous novels, including Crossways, The Perfect Place, Cracks, and Children of Pithiviers (all available in Other Press editions). A native of South Africa, she makes her home in New York City and teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.