A Coin in Nine Hands

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.A Coin in Nine Hands has . . . passages that move close to poetry and a story that belongs in both literature and history.-Doris Grumbach Los Angeles Times Book ReviewWhat lingers at the end of A Coin in Nine Hands 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 The New RepublicWithin 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 Houston PostTranscends its specific time and place to become a portrait of vividly delineated characters caught in the vise of a tragically familiar political situation.-Publisher''s WeeklyBest known as the author of Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87) achieved countless literary honors and was the first woman ever elected to the Académie Française.