Lark and Termite

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the award-winning author a "powerful and emotionally piercing" novel (The New York Times) set during the 1950 in West Virginia and Korea, that intertwines family secrets, war, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all.

Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite's father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War.

Told with deep feeling, the novel invites us deep into the hearts and thoughts of Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk, who is filled with radiance. We are also with Corporal Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire alongside the Korean children he tries to rescue. We see Lark's dreams for Termite and her own future, and how, with the aid of a childhood love and a spectral social worker, she makes them happen. We learn of Lola's love for her soldier husband and her children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie.

We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever.

Author: Jayne Anne Phillips
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 01/12/2010
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.06h x 5.16w x 0.89d
ISBN: 9780375701931


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 01/10/2010 pg. 20
People Weekly 03/01/2010 pg. 49

About the Author
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.