» Read an interview with Claire Berlinski

Using Loose Lips as her point of departure, this drama of love and espionage is both a suspenseful spy novel and an arch, dark comedy about romance and fantasy on the Internet. A fictional Claire — a novelist who lives in Paris, like the real Claire — falls in love with the Lion, a man she has never once seen. The poetic Persian archeologist, who claims to be a fan of Loose Lips, sends lush, melancholy letters to her from Isfahan, Iran. When she decamps at his suggestion for Istanbul, she discovers that he is not at all what he seems. But what is he? And who are the other people she thought she knew? And who, for that matter, is our narrator, really?

This rich, multi-layered (and hilarious) novel perfectly captures the obsessive erotic compulsion of an email relationship, the personal betrayals real espionage inevitably involves, and the inevitability of discovering that people are not what we long for them to be. Lion Eyes, like Loose Lips, contains stories within stories, characters within characters, ideas within ideas. A true mousetrap.