Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
A brilliant and beautiful contemporary novel about love and memory from the author of the bestselling novels All He Ever Wanted and The Pilot's Wife.
The events of a December afternoon, during which a father and his daughter find an abandoned infant in the snow, will forever alter the 11-year-old girl's understanding of the world and the adults who inhabit it: a father who has taken great pains to remove himself from society in order to put an unthinkable tragedy behind him; a young woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is exceeded only by his sense of justice.
Written from the point of view of 30-year-old Nicky as she recalls the vivid images of that fateful December, her tale is one of love and courage, of tragedy and redemption, and of the ways in which the human heart always seeks to heal itself.
The Washington Post - Chris Bohjalian
The images of Nicky's father alone with his grief or the moment when Nicky menstruates for the first time with no mother with whom to discuss it are authentic and poignant; the complex rush of emotions Nicky experiences around the infant's mom -- fear, fascination and (for a variety of reasons the novel makes clear) adoration -- is a well-drawn microcosm of adolescence. The overall result is a novel that probably won't be studied by Shreve scholars in fifty or a hundred years, but one that nevertheless offers moments that are diverting and pleasurable.