Lili

the long version

"Lili is growing up on the outskirts of Paris. As a child, she "lay in the crook of her mother's arm, in her mother's warm, sweat-smelling embrace, a smell like hay, like over-ripe peaches, and that was God." And as she matures, Lili's faith remains so intense that she becomes alienated from her family, observing the foibles of her twin brother, Maurice, the failures of her inept brother, Andre, and the charms of her older cousin, Claude-Francois.". "Womanhood and impending war send tremors through Lili's circumscribed world. Stirred by her cousin's confession of love, she begins a journey that even as it carries her deeper into herself, takes her ever farther from the foundations of her childhood faith. The ravages of World War I - in particular, the fate of Andre and Claude-Francois - test Lili's character and gradually, subtly, reshape it. Lili turns to philosophy for spiritual sustenance and to teaching for subsistence. A new love, a failed marriage, a disabled child, a passionate affair with a Jewish woman whose change of faith parallels Lili's own - time and again, an awakening passion is challenged by a reversal of fortune. Faced with personal adversity and social calamity, Lili explores the mutable nature of faith and searches for its ultimate expression: redemption."--BOOK JACKET.