Lilian
1922
Lilian Share sits alone in a West End typewriting office long after the machines have stopped clacking, watching London night settle over the city like a held breath. She is twenty-something, parentless, and trapped in a life that feels like a waiting room with no door. The office where she types other people's letters by day becomes her confessional by night, a place where the silence finally allows her to admit how desperately she wants something more than this. When a confrontation with the night-watchman shatters the quiet, Lilian finds herself suddenly, uncomfortably awake to the world again. The novel traces her days through the typing pool and the strange geometries of office politics, between the demands of her employers Felix and Miss Grig and the glittering, indifferent city beyond the window. Lilian's childhood was small and sheltered; her inheritance was loss. Now she watches the women who pass below in furs and feathers, and the resentment builds like steam in a sealed vessel. This is a story about the particular cruelty of wanting beauty in a world that offers drudgery, and the dangerous things a young woman might do when she stops believing the world will give her what she deserves. For readers who cherish quiet literary portraits of early 20th-century women trapped between tradition and yearning, Lilian offers an intimate, often uncomfortable glimpse into one woman's reckoning with the life she's been handed.
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“But I will follow you anywhere, baby. I’ll run a never-ending race for you. Name the distance. I’ll go at whatever speed you let me. I’ll sprint, walk, or crawl to get to you. I will never give you up.””
— Unknown
“A kid can be born happy, but it’s the love they receive that teaches their heart to be gentle.””
— Unknown
“In here, I will take control because you and I both know you need it that way in order to turn your mind off. I will learn your body better than my own and have you writhing and begging me for more.” He caressed his thumbs across my cheeks and down the line of my jaw to press on my chin, forcing my lips apart. “But outside this room, Maddie, you fucking own me. I will worship the very ground you walk on if you’ll only let me.””
— Unknown
“Being with a manipulative partner is like an addiction. But instead of a drug, you’re addicted to them, to making them happy because it’s the only time you can be happy. You acclimate to their behavior a little at a time, until you grow numb to it. Until it’s no longer the worst day you’ve ever had, it’s just Monday. “Then one day they stop giving you your fix. They leave you writhing on the floor, screaming out into the void, all the while knowing, even through the pain, you’re going to wake up and do it all over again. Forever chasing the high of making them happy.””
— Unknown
“The coolest thing about choices, bud, is they’re yours. You don’t have to like anyone if you don’t want to. You should never be rude without cause, but there is nothing that says you have to like Mr. Garrett.””
— Unknown
“Seeing him felt like a sun was settling inside me.””
— Unknown
“That’s your one freebie. Once I have you naked, the only name I want to hear you call out is mine. You need to send up a prayer when I make you scream? I want it to be to me.””
— Unknown
“I’ve always wanted to be a dad, wanted to see a woman I loved swollen with my child.””
— Unknown
“He was sneaky as a fox and stubborn as a bull.””
— Unknown
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Unknown. Lilian. Lex, lex-books.com/book/lilian-60c096dc-8aa4-42a0-ad45-535403c4024b.Unknown (1922). Lilian. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/lilian-60c096dc-8aa4-42a0-ad45-535403c4024bUnknown. Lilian. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/lilian-60c096dc-8aa4-42a0-ad45-535403c4024b.
