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See also www.annabellyon.blogspot.com
58,000 words
Manuscript now available
US: Knopf, Aug 2013
Canada: Random House, Sep 2012
Canada French language: Editions Alto
UK: Atlantic Books, Jan 2013
France: Editions la Table Ronde
Turkey: Pegasus Yayinlari
(Photo: Phillip Chin)
Annabel Lyon is the author of Oxygen (stories), The Best Thing for You (novellas), which was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, All-Season Edie (juvenile novel), and The Golden Mean, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Ethel Wilson Prize, and the Commonwealth Prize. Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize, The Golden Mean has been translated into fourteen languages and became a #1 bestseller in Canada. The Sweet Girl is a sequel to it. Her latest work for young people, Encore Edie, was released in February 2011 to glowing reviews.
Annabel studied classical music, philosophy, and law and taught piano before she decided to write full-time. She lives on the west coast of Canada outside Vancouver, British Columbia, with her partner and two children, who were born during the eight years she took to write The Golden Mean. She teaches at the Creative Writing Department of the University of British Columbia, from which she received her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts.
by Annabel Lyon
A LOVE STORY TOLD FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ARISTOTLE’S SIXTEEN-
YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, PYTHIAS
- Annabel's talk on The Sweet Girl at Ben MacNally's Books and Brunch, Toronto (starts at minute 31)
- The Sweet Girl is on the Giller longlist
- The Sweet Girl makes the Top 20 in the Toronto Star
- 15 dazzling fall fiction reads: The Globe and Mail singles out The Sweet Girl
“The intimate and the infinite are tangled together in this incandescent book, lit by Aristotle’s bright spark of a daughter. Lucid even in nightmare, The Sweet Girl slips sideways around the philosopher to examine the lives of girls and women when we were not yet human.” — MARINA ENDICOTT, author of The Little Shadows and Good to a Fault
“Annabel Lyon is a wonderful writer, adept at breathing life into the ancient past. She reanimates near-mythical characters until we feel we know them intimately—their dreams and desires, their brilliance and their failings—which is an achievement only the finest historical novelists can aspire to. I loved The Golden Mean, and to return to the world of Aristotle and Alexander in The Sweet Girl is a rare pleasure.” — JANE JOHNSON, author of The Tenth Gift, The Salt Road and The Sultan’s Wife
Pythias was a toddler in Annabel Lyon’s award-winning first novel, The Golden Mean. In Aristotle’s will (an actual historical document) he made careful provision for Pythias’ arranged marriage. The Sweet Girl is about the resulting power struggle between father and daughter over control of her future; about their family’s flight from Athens after the death of Alexander the Great, and about Pythias’ harrowing ordeal after her father’s death.
We see what it was like to be a little girl coming of age under the tutelage of a brilliant philosopher father, and discover the lived experience of a young woman in ancient Greece. Until her betrothed came home from war to claim her, Pythias was left to the mercy of myriad social forces beyond her control. Although she was sure that she didn’t 
want to be farmed out arbitrarily to an older man, Pythias also had to find a way around the stranglehold of her society.
In The Sweet Girl we follow her as she navigates dramatic dilemmas with wit, intelligence, and strength, and with surprising and gratifying results.
PRAISE FOR ANNABEL LYON’S FIRST NOVEL, THE GOLDEN MEAN
“This quietly ambitious and beautifully achieved novel is one of the most convincing historical novels I have ever read. Lyon makes her reader avid for every detail of this strange world, whether domestic or medical or military, and she has steeped herself in the thinking of the time. She makes her characters entirely solid and real, while respecting their otherness, the distance between us. That is what characterised Mary Renault’s novels, and I think that she would have deeply admired this book. [Lyon’s] judgment is sound and true, and the reader trusts her voice from the first paragraph.” — HILARY MANTEL
“The Golden Mean is more than a brilliant and beautifully told novel: it’s also a profound exploration of moral and philosophical issues that have troubled and perplexed us since Aristotle.” — RUSSELL BANKS, author of Cloudsplitter
“The 4th century BC and the youth of Alexander the Great are marvelously re-imagined in Lyon’s justifiably garlanded novel… The daily intrigues of the court, the visceral aspects of battle, philosophical discussion, and Aristotle’s household are all evoked in measured, burnished prose, which combines thrilling immediacy with a stately timelessness.” — THE GUARDIAN
“It takes chutzpah to make your main characters Aristotle and Alexander the Great, but Lyon pulls it off; she has the gift of finding the pulse of the ancient world and bringing it back to glorious life… gripping, with a powerful sense of time and place.” — THE TIMES, LONDON