The Oyster Diaries

By: Nancy Lemann

Published by New York Review of Books, 2026-04-07

From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most singular voices.

Delery Anhalt—middle-aged, prone to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” like Don Quixote, but incapable of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life, like Desdemona—is at a crossroads in life. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years, her daughters are stepping into adulthood, and she is navigating the uncertainty of being midway upon the journey of her life.

Caught between a generation fixed in the past and one intent on changing the future, Delery decides to take stock of herself and the people around her through a series of diaries brimming with wry observations of her upbringing in New Orleans and daily travails in Washington DC, and frank appraisals on what she calls her lions at the gate: the interior demands of insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly towards bad houseguests), and remorse.

A disarmingly funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that is as exuberant as it is indignant, The Oyster Diaries sees the return of the beloved character Claude Collier from The Lives of the Saints. Full of uncomfortable hilarities and potent truths, this novel proves to us, once again, that Nancy Lemann is one of our most fearless and original writers on the human condition.