‘I watched my father run forward in his snowshoes the way one sometimes does in dreams, unable to make the legs move fast enough. I ran to the place where he knelt. I looked down into the sleeping bag. A tiny face gazed up at me, the eyes wide despite their many folds. The baby was wrapped in a bloody towel, and its lips were blue.’
The events of a December afternoon on which a father and his daughter find an abandoned infant in the snow will forever alter eleven-year-old Nicky Dillon's understanding of the world which she is about to enter and the adults who inhabit it: a father who has taken great pains to remove himself from society in order to put behind him an unthinkable tragedy; a young woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is superseded only by his sense of justice. Written from the point of view of thirty-year-old Nicky as she recalls the vivid images of that fateful December, hers is a tale of love and courage, of tragedy and redemption, and of the ways in which the human heart always seeks to heal itself.
ALL HE EVER WANTED:
- ‘Anita Shreve’s assured, subtle writing makes this more than a typical tale of Victorian marital oppression’ TELEGRAPH
- ‘It is fluent and purposeful in its portrayal of the despair and claustrophobia seething beneath an ordered surface’ THE TIMES
- ‘As Trollope was in his day, Shreve is prolific, polished, unputdownable. Above all, she delivers serious topics with a readable touch' GUARDIAN
- SEA GLASS
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- 'A beautifully visualised novel of emotional discovery' - Sunday Times
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- 'Few other contemporary novelists weave past and present so skilfully, capturing the seamless texture of time' - Newsday
Audiobook (CD):
£15.99
Published 07/10/2004
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