Like others who wanted John Kerry to defeat President Bush, author Lily Tuck was in such despair after Election Day that she wondered if she should remain in the United States. She thought of returning to her native Paris, the bane of Bush supporters, or at least hanging a French flag from the balcony of her apartment overlooking Madison Avenue. Then again, there is no flag to which Tuck would truly pledge allegiance, for she has never felt at home anywhere.

 "There's a wonderful line from the poet (Paul) Celan that says, `In the air, that's where your roots are, over there, in the air.' And that's true for me," Tuck said during a recent interview in her apartment's salon, a bright, eclectic room that includes old-fashioned armchairs and sofas, bronze dancers from Switzerland and wooden statues from Burma that frame a fireplace decorated in yellow tile.

As both writer and matriarch, she has clearly left her mark in this country. The 66-year-old Tuck has three children, three stepchildren and 10 grandchildren living in the United States. Her current novel, "The News From Paraguay," recently won the National Book Award for fiction and brought long-awaited recognition to a woman whose first book came out 13 years ago.

Slender and well-spoken, often described by friends as "elegant," Tuck is the author of five books, mostly stories about women getting by in foreign countries. The acclaimed "Siam," a PEN/Faulkner finalist in 2000, is based on her years in Thailand in the 1960s. Some of the stories in the collection "Limbo" are also about her time in Thailand and on her family's flight from France to Peru in the 1940s. The novel "The Woman Who Walked on Water" was inspired by a friend who left her family for spiritual pursuits in India.

Even stories far from Tuck's experience inevitably return to the theme of displacement. "The News From Paraguay" is based on the true story of Ella Lynch, the Irish-born mistress of 19th-century Paraguayan leader Francisco Solano Lopez. Tuck chronicles Lynch's decline from the impulsive teenager who runs off with a handsome stranger from South America to the haunted survivor of her lover's death and her adopted country's disastrous war with Brazil.

Exile is an old story for Tuck, whose parents fled France as war spread throughout Europe in the 1940s. Feelings of unsettlement often began on the journey over; she fainted on the plane ride to Peru, where her family first lived after leaving Europe, and fell sick again on the crowded ship that brought her and her mother to the United States, in 1947.

Solitary and out of place, unwilling to speak English until she could do so without an accent, Tuck felt most at home with books. She began reading compulsively at an early age and soon wrote compulsively, too. A favorite anecdote involves a train ride to Ithaca, N.Y., where she was to visit her grandparents.

"I was in the dining car when a man said to me, `What do you want to be when you grow up little girl?' and I said, `A writer,' and he said, `Isn't that interesting? I'm a writer, too.' And he wrote his name on a piece of paper and said, `When you write something let me know and I'll try and help you.' I was thrilled. I thought my career was made," Tuck says.

"Then I got off the train in Ithaca and my grandmother met me. She was stern and severe. I told her about the man on the train and showed her the piece of paper. And guess what? She tore up the piece of paper. To this day, I don't know who the man was."

Destiny was derailed again in her adult life. She married soon after graduating from Radcliffe College, raised three children and then divorced. Only in her mid-30s did she seriously pursue writing again.

For years, she worked on fiction nobody wanted to publish. Her luck finally changed in her early 50s when she began studying under the famed editor Gordon Lish, whose many writers have included Raymond Carver, T. Coraghessan Boyle and two of Tuck's fellow National Book Award finalists, Christine Schutt and Kate Walbert.

"Those classes were very, very intense," Tuck says. "He taught for six hours, 6 to midnight. They were private sessions, with maybe 20 of us. There were no breaks for foods or chitchat."

Tuck credits Lish with not only educating her as a writer, but as a person, encouraging her to be proud of her calling and carry herself accordingly. Lish, who remains friendly with Tuck and lives just a few blocks away, recalls being impressed by Tuck's honesty and "supreme elegance"

"Lily is steadfast, always determined," he says. "I think her chief quality is a rare combination of resolve and modesty."

Tuck's first book, the novel "Interviewing Matisse," was published in 1991 by Alfred A. Knopf, where Lish was an editor. But the independent-minded Lish was soon fired by Knopf and Tuck began the long, tiring journey of the "mid-list" writer, changing publishers throughout the decade before settling in 2000 at HarperCollins. A key supporter was fellow author Francine Prose, who championed Tuck's novel, "Siam."

"She's such an elegant writer, and so spare and so understated, and so tough at the same time," says Prose, whose many books include the novel "Blue Angel" and "The Lives of the Muses," a nonfiction work. "Lily doesn't call attention to herself. She puts a lot of confidence in the intelligence of the reader."

While some publishers and critics worried that Tuck and her fellow National Book Award finalists — Walbert, Schutt, Joan Silber and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum — were too obscure to attract interest in the literary prize, Tuck is now enjoying unprecedented commercial appeal. HarperCollins has increased the number of hardcover copies for "The News From Paraguay" from less than 10,000 to around 25,000 and will publish the paperback in December, five months earlier than planned, with a first printing of 80,000.

  "People have been asking for the paperback already and my experience is that having a paperback come right after the hardcover wins an award means you get a lot of sales," says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla.

In accepting her fiction award, Tuck thanked her fellow "unknown finalists" and said they "all agreed how allied we are and how very supportive we feel of each other." The five writers have met frequently and speak jokingly of having their nominated books issued in a single bound volume.

Meanwhile, Tuck, the self-described exile, is talking about traveling. She never visited Paraguay for her current novel, but she is thinking about using her prize money, $10,000, for a trip to Laos. And for her next book, set in Italy, she plans to spend time in Rome next spring.