The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (31 page)

Acknowledgments

I thank the gods of publishing for my kind and gifted editor, Lee Boudreaux, and my agent/champion, Ginger Barber.

As ever, I owe at the very least my soul to Stacy Schiff and Mameve Medwed, eager and artful first readers and the best audience a gal could have.

I am grateful for the attentions and talents of Brian McLendon, Sally Marvin, Robbin Schiff, and Amy Edelman of Random House; Marty Asher, Russell Perreault, and Jen Marshall of Vintage; Laurie Horowitz of CAA, and Elyse Green of the William Morris Agency.

I thank Christopher Potter of Fourth Estate for his faith in my books and for their British home.

Alice particularly thanks: Dr. Robert Austin, verisimilitude coach, proofreader, and unwitting supplier of phrases I pounced on; Dr. Steve Lee, onetime surgical resident, who had tales and traumas to recall wryly; Eileen Giardina, labor and delivery nurse, who helped me bring FIR into the world; and Tim Farrington for his way with words.

ELINOR LIPMAN

The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

Elinor Lipman is the author of
The Dearly Departed
,
The
Ladies' Man
,
The Inn at Lake Devine
,
Isabel's Bed
,
The
Way Men Act
,
Then She Found Me,
and
Into Love and Out
Again.
Her work has appeared in
The New York Times
,
The
Boston Globe
, the
Chicago Tribune
,
Gourmet
,
Salon
,
Self
,
More
, and
Yankee Magazine
. She has taught writing at Simmons, Hampshire, and Smith colleges, and won the 2001 New England Book Award for fiction. She lives in Massachusetts.

ALSO BY ELINOR LIPMAN

The Dearly Departed
The Ladies' Man
The Inn at Lake Devine
Isabel's Bed
The Way Men Act
Then She Found Me
Into Love and Out Again

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2004

Copyright © 2003 by Elinor Lipman

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and
Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Lipman, Elinor.
The pursuit of Alice Thrift: a novel / Elinor Lipman
p. cm.
1. Women physicians—Fiction. 2. Interns (Medicine)—Fiction.
3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction.
5. Courtship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I577 P87 2003
813'.54—dc21
2002031864

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www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42923-0

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