As none of my GR friends have read this novel, I have no idea how it ended up on my tbr list. I also have no idea what the point of the story was; there didn't seem to be any plot or direction. It was an ordinary, very ordinary read. 2★

Vendela Vida, also known as the wife of Dave Eggers, has written a book about Yvonne, the widow, who goes to Turkey to grieve and remember her late husband. Her destination is Datca, the place where decades before she spent her honeymoon. As Turkey is the ‘land where archaeologists came and were startled to find entire town as they once were’, she expects to find things exactly as she left them all those years ago, so she can re-enact the happy times of the early days of her marriage. Something,...

Apparently, I read this back in 2017 but reading it again now, I had no recollection of it. It's a slim novel that carries an air of menace. Two years after she's been widowed, Yvonne, a 53 year old history teacher in Vermont, returns to Datca, the seaside town in Turkey where she and her husband had honeymooned three decades before. The town is no longer beautiful as it used to be, it's become seedy, but the air of menace does not come from the expected quarters of an American woman traveling a...

I like Vendela Vida's writing a lot. It's pared down to the essentials, with a great forward momentum--even when the characters are privately mulling over the past, as Yvonne is in this book. I like how she captures the surrealism of ordinary details--white freckles on a man's arms, a hotel room in a cave, a woman who only arranges her face so that she looks beautiful when she knows she's being looked at. I agree with those who say that she writes in the vein of Paul Bowles--these travel novels

This month was dedicated to a marathon of #laslasreads - a book where a character dies, or where they cope with the loss. Or where you just lingered in a limbo and unsure where to go. Of all the books that I've read, this book shined because it gave me a sense of closure. It has awarded me a piece of solace. This, no matter how simple it was written, or how short the development it, gave me an ending - exactly how I imagined it would end. Some may consider this prose a comfort read, a novel that...

I made a rookie error and poor, poor Vendela Vida's novel "The Lovers" is the innocent victim.It all started when I feel madly in love with Jennifer Egan's book "A Visit from the Goon Squad." I lovingly caressed the cover, made kissy faces at it, considered starting from scratch and rereading it immediately. I tried to think of a better book in all the world over, and failed. I sighed a lot. The music of REO Speedwagon finally made sense to me.What I should have done: Chased it with something co...

I really wanted to like this book, since I loved my time in Turkey. However, I found the events unrealistic and couldn't get past this. The ending was preposterous!

Yvonne's life has taken unexpected turns over the years. Her husband has died in a horrific hit-and-run car accident; their children, twins Matt and Aurelia, are grown now, but Aurelia's teenage years and on were riddled with drug and alcohol abuse, filled with lies and deceptions and stints in rehab. Yvonne returns to Datca in Turkey where she and her husband had spent their honeymoon in hopes of returning to memories that don't involve death and dishonesty while at the same time desiring to fi...

The second title from Vendela Vida that I have read; the second winner. Like Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, the writing is simple yet illuminating, picturesque prose especially exemplified as her settings seem to be lesser popularized travel destinations. Here she has her heroine, Yvonne, in Turkey, including Datca, Istanbul, Konya, Kronos; the most mesmerizing being those near the water as she spends time with Ahmet. It is a story of self-discovery. A story about marriage, love, mothe...

A great reminder of what traveling is like. Feeling out of place, tired, skipping dinner and only eating cheese. Great one liners and reminders about not understanding foreign languages.

The Lovers, at first glance, seems to be an unfortunate title for this story: a middle-aged widow, Yvonne, journeys back to a seaside village in Turkey where she and her husband had happily honeymooned decades before. She is there to spend some time alone before meeting up with her twin adult children – her troubled and addicted daughter Aurelia and her “perfect” son Matthew – for a cruise.An aura of menace with wisps of sexual tension pervades most of the novel. The vacation home is spotless an...

A real page turner --but not in a good way. First let me say that there was a lot that I liked about this book, especially at the beginning. I liked the premise: widowed Yvonne, a school teacher, goes to Turkey, which is where she and her husband had gone on their honeymoon, 20-something years earlier. I also was very fond of Yvonne; I found her interesting, sympathetic, with compelling personal problems to work on during this trip. And I really liked Vida's prose, which balances descriptive tra...

Vida’s novel opens with Yvonne, a middle-aged widow, lost and looking for her driver in a Turkish airport. Vacationing alone in an attempt to recapture the magic of her honeymoon in Turkey twenty-six years before, lost is how Yvonne spends most of the novel, metaphorically speaking. While her husband was killed in a car accident years before, this is Yvonne’s first trip without him. Even though the reader hears stories about Yvonne’s life at home in Vermont, it feels to the reader as though thi...

This is a slow, meandering, and emotionally disjointed story of a woman who has recently become a widow. The meandering quality is because the descriptions and sequence of them felt like a travelogue; a woman travels from Burlington, Vermont, to Turkey, and within Turkey, to the place of her honeymoon, to Konya (Rumi’s hometown), and to other smaller towns. Toward the end (page 211 of 225 pages), we are reminded that she has taken this journey because she is trying to recapture something from de...

Interesting small book ---Its really closer to a 3 star book ---(yet, I'm giving it 4 stars). I liked the 'intimacy' I felt while reading it. (I was swept right into this this story). I could see a few things in the plot which are questionable ---however --I enjoyed the flow of writing --and who cares if I maybe the story could have taken a different direction. Truth was---I was pretty damn 'PRESENT' while reading every word of 'Vida's book! This is my first book I've read by Vendela Vida (wife

Vendela Vida's relatively short novel, The Lovers, packs a big wallop. It is a multi-layered story about Yvonne, a widow, who returns to Turkey where she and her husband once honeymooned. She believes that by returning to the same place where they had been together early in her marriage, she will feel closer to him. Her husband Peter was recently killed in a hit and run car accident in their hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Yvonne has rented a large home, sight unseen, for a couple of weeks unti...

Ms. Vida presents us with another spare and reflective novel about a woman searching to redefine herself after the death of a loved one. Instead of the cold glow of the Arctic Circle that defined Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Ms. Vida bathes the protagonist of The Lovers, Yvonne, in the cerulean blue of the Turkish Riviera. Ms. Vida writes so deftly and with such elegance. You are given just the right depth of detail to create your own vision of setting and character and the just enou...

As a huge fan of this author's last book: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I was very excited to read Vida's latest novel, The Lovers.Like in her last novel, this story is about a woman on an emotional journey, traveling far from home to find herself and meaning in her life. Yvonne is a 53 year old woman, mother of adult twins: Matthew and Auerelia. She lost her husband Peter, two years earlier and is still numb from the loss. She is tired of having everyone still asking how she is doing...

The Lovers, Vendela Vida The Lovers is a novel set in Turkey, where a newly widowed woman returns to the place of her honeymoon, almost three decades before. She's trying to escape her life in Vermont, and her new status as the pitied single woman among couples. As the mother of grown twins, she is conflicted with her memories of her marriage and her relationship with her children. She's discovering that as more time passes since her husband's death, the more she is forced to re-evaluate their r...