Une jeune fille sage

I'm so pleased that The Sweet Girl is now available in Quebec under the title Une jeune fille sage from Editions Alto.  Merci, Antoine et Tania, pour tous vos efforts!

ImagiNation

I was honoured last week to take part in ImagiNation, Quebec City's English language writers' festival, alongside Miriam Toews, Terry Fallis, Wayne Grady, Sheila Fischman, and many more.  Thanks to the organizers for a wonderful event!

Washington Times Review

"With exquisite skill, the author evokes Pythias and her family as credible members of a community that existed more than two millennia ago. At the same time, she shows their kinship with us, allowing us to see their constraints as different from our own, but nonetheless analogous."

To read Claire Hopley's full review, please click here.

Hello America!

Here's the lovely American cover for The Sweet Girl.  Many thanks to my editor, Diana Coglianese, and everyone at Knopf US for all their hard work!

Daily Beast Article

Please click here to read my article "Who Was Aristotle's Daughter?" in The Daily Beast.  From the article:

"I didn’t want to write a fairy tale. I didn’t want to make Pythias into a historical-fiction princess, living a story of forbidden love in fancy dress and encouraging the reader to deplore the circumstances of her oppression from a comfortable moral distance. We’ve all read that novel too many times."

Boston Globe Review

From The Boston Globe's review of The Sweet Girl, by Kathryn Lang:

"This is an entertaining work, a plausible story full of raw gusto, leavened occasionally by a nod to Aristotle’s abstruse ideas. As Lyon portrays her, Pythias is not the “sweet girl” her father had called her, but resilient and resourceful — a survivor."

You can read the full review here.

The Sweet Girl

I'm so pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of my sequel to The Golden Mean, entitled The Sweet Girl.

From the jacket copy:

"Pythias is her father's daughter, with eyes his exact shade of unlovely, intelligent grey. A slave to his own curiosity and intellect, Aristotle has never been able to resist wit in another--even in a girl child who should be content with the kitchen, the loom and a life dictated by the womb. And oh his little Pytho is smart, able to best his own students in debate and match wits with a roomful of Athenian philosophers. Is she a freak or a harbinger of what women can really be? Pythias must suffer that argument, but she is also (mostly) secure in her father's regard.

But then Alexander dies a thousand miles from Athens, and sentiment turns against anyone associated with him, most especially his famous Macedonian-born teacher. Aristotle and his family are forced to flee to Chalcis, a garrison town. Ailing, mourning and broken in spirit, Aristotle soon dies. And his orphaned daughter, only 16, finds out that the world is a place of superstition, not logic, and that a girl can be played upon by gods and goddesses, as much as by grown men and women. To safely journey to a place in which she can be everything she truly is, Aristotle's daughter will need every ounce of wit she possesses, but also grace and the capacity to love."