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woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is superseded only by his sense of justice.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.
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woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is superseded only by his sense of justice.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.
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Reviews
Full of emotional depth, it's not a comfortable read but one that will stay with you a long time. Oprah says that if a book doesn't grab her in the first 50 pages, she moves on. There'll be no need for that
DAILY MIRROR
DAILY MIRROR
This story touches the very deepest human emotions . . . Chaucerian in its intense sympathy and its appealing universality . . . 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
Anita Shreve's eleventh novel plunges the reader straight into a gripping narrative . . . This is Shreve at her poised best, and her controlled, crisply understated prose makes her emotive subject all the more affecting
Full of emotional depth, it's not a comfortable read but one that will stay with you a long time. Oprah says that if a book doesn't grab her in the first 50 pages, she moves on. There'll be no need for that