The Peacock Feast

A Novel

By: Lisa Gornick

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

"Listeners will be fully engaged with Tavia Gilbert's sublime narration.... She does a remarkable job depicting every character." (AudioFile magazine, Earphones Award winner)

From “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America...immensely talented and brave” (Michael Schaub, NPR), a historical saga about love, class, and the past we never escape.

The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 when Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamites the breakwater at Laurelton Hall - his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion, with columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and a smokestack hidden in a blue-banded minaret - so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes both the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany’s prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks where Randall, her seven-year-old brother, is playing.

Nearly a century later, Prudence receives an unexpected visit at her New York apartment from Grace, a hospice nurse and the granddaughter of Randall, who Prudence never saw again after he left at age 14 for California. The mementos Grace carries from her grandfather’s house stir Prudence’s long-repressed memories and bring her to a new understanding of the choices she made in work and love, and what she faces now in her final days.

Spanning the 20th century and three continents, The Peacock Feast ricochets from Manhattan to San Francisco, from the decadent mansions of the Tiffany family to the death row of a Texas prison, and from the London consultation room of Anna Freud to a Mendocino commune. With psychological acuity and aching eloquence, Lisa Gornick has written a sweeping family drama, an exploration of the meaning of art and the art of dying and an illuminating portrait of how our decisions reverberate across time and space.

©2019 Lisa Gornick (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Listeners will be fully engaged with Tavia Gilbert's sublime narration...She does a remarkable job depicting every character." — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

An unusual tale

I liked this story very much. It was not what I expected and had some twists. I wished there had been an Epilogue to tie things up.

Profound & insightful

Excellently written and well read...story of relationships interwoven through generations and life events with profound consequences..discerning & insightful. Best book I’ve read in a long time.