A Coin in Nine Hands

<p>During the space of a day in Rome in 1933, a ten-lira coin passes through the hands of nine people-including an aging artist, a prostitute, and a would-be assassin of Mussolini. The coin becomes the symbol of contact between human beings, each lost in private passions and nearly impenetrable solitude.<br><br>"<i>A Coin in Nine Hands</i> has . . . passages that move close to poetry and a story that belongs in both literature and history."-Doris Grumbach, <i>Los Angeles Times Book Review</i><br><br>"What lingers at the end of <i>A Coin in Nine Hands</i> is the shadowiness and puppetlike vagueness of the Dictator, and the compelling specificity of the so-called 'common people' revolving all around him."-Anne Tyler, <i>The New Republic</i><br><br>"Within a few pages we have met half the major characters in this haunting, brilliantly constructed novel. . . . The studied perfection, the structural intricacy and brevity remind one of Camus. Yet by comparison, Yourcenar's prose is lavish, emotional and imagistic."-Cynthia King, <i>Houston Post</i><br><br>"Transcends its specific time and place to become a portrait of vividly delineated characters caught in the vise of a tragically familiar political situation."-<i>Publisher's Weekly</i><br><br>Best known as the author of <i>Memoirs of Hadrian</i> and <b>The Abyss</b>, Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87) achieved countless literary honors and was the first woman ever elected to the Académie Française.</p>