I read this author’s first novel, Eden Close, and just knew that one day she would become a star. It’s taken longer than I’d expected and an Oprah Winfrey Book Club choice in America to really draw her out but now a star she most certainly is. This is her eleventh novel, a poignant, sensitive tale of loss and loneliness and one of her best. So, if you have not tried her, you are in for a treat and you have lots more as you devour her back list. Weight of Water is another stunner.
Read by Patricia Rodriquez Abridged on 5 CDs Running time approx 6 hours
‘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woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is superseded only by his sense of justice.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.
‘Shreve’s style is fluent and unpretentious, with an irresistible rhythmic and narrative impetus that keeps you up, reading ever faster, all night . . . Perceptive, gripping and ultimately exhilarating, this is a very fine book indeed’ Sue Gaisford, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
‘This is Shreve at her poised best, and her controlled, crisply understated prose makes her emotive subject all the more affecting’ DAILY MAIL
'In a world teeming with novels which do not live up to their hype, it is a treat to read one whose emotional depth belies its simple-seeming exterior. LIGHT ON SNOW is a gem of a book by the daintiest of storytellers' Max Davidson, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
‘Full of emotional depth, it’s not a comfortable read but one that will stay with you a long time’ Star Choice, DAILY MIRROR
‘Emotionally rich . . . it’s the literary equivalent of a snuggly blanket on a snowy night’ MARIE CLAIRE
‘Shreve delivers a skilled and very readable book’ SUNDAY TRIBUNE (IRELAND)
Author
About Anita Shreve
Anita Shreve is the author of fifteen best-selling novels which have spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller Lists. The Weight of Water was short listed for the Orange Prize and The Pilot’s Wife was selected by Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Book club’ series. Shreve started her writing career as a journalist and her award-winning short stories and non-fiction have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. Shreve is married to a man she met when she was 13. She has two children and three stepchildren and lives in Massachusetts.
Anita Shreve was our Author of the Month in February 2012.
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