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A Novel
by Elizabeth Poliner
From the author of the acclaimed As Close to Us as Breathing, a captivating novel steeped in history, revealing the bonds of family and community, and the healing powers hidden inside broken hearts.
For much of her adult life Ruth Pearl has lived in the small New England town of Wells, Connecticut, on the shore of Lake Topaqua. Decades back, when she was fourteen, she and her parents fled German-occupied Amsterdam after the murder of her beloved older sister Sophia, and in the wake of such loss, Ruth has long taken comfort in the natural beauty of her lake view.
But in the winter of 2000, Ruth's neighbor builds an addition to his home that blocks Ruth's view, a disruption of her peace that sparks fear that her tumultuous past is happening again. One day, seeking solace, Ruth heads out for a cathartic skate on the lake only to spot a boy in the distance falling through the ice. Also witnessing this event is Judge Arthur Cantrell, by chance in Wells that day to avoid the consequences of a failed romance.
Together, Ruth and Arthur save Ian Lima, a despairing sixteen-year-old, and over the days to come, as Ruth and Arthur help Ian heal, they find themselves healing too. Soon enough, this turn of events begins to impact Ruth's daughter, Ian's mother, and even Arthur's love interest.
In Spinning at the Edges, Elizabeth Poliner, a masterful storyteller, seamlessly interweaves the lives of a rich cast of characters living in two historical time periods—America 2000, marked by a controversial presidential election, and Netherlands 1941, marked by rising fascism—to tell an unforgettable story about how the past haunts the present, how sharing pain heals, and how love—and even democracy—are fragile concepts in a changing, spinning world.
"Tender treatment of flawed but sympathetic characters compensates for a sometimes confusing storyline." —Kirkus Reviews
"[C]luttered but affecting...This will stay with readers." —Publishers Weekly
"Book after captivating book, Elizabeth Poliner has been building an exceptional body of work full of characters who rise up from her pages and perform exquisite, literary magic. Spinning at the Edges is, simply, a marvel, because Poliner knows a story of lasting quality needs no flashing neon lights but only people who get up from their beds and go on with lives both simple and complex. Poliner does this with uncommon skill whether her people are fleeing World War II Amsterdam or skating in the dark on a Connecticut lake or walking the streets of Washington, D.C." —Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Known World
"Elizabeth Poliner's Spinning at the Edges cracks the surface of the present to expose the underlying turbulence of the silenced past. In pages resonant with the heartbreak of history, she lets us glimpse the ways our lives can collide, and the unexpected gifts these collisions can give." —Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink
This information about Spinning at the Edges was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elizabeth Poliner is the author of the novel As Close to Us as Breathing, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia's People's Choice Award in Fiction and the Ribalow Prize. She has also published a poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands, and a novel-in-stories, Mutual Life & Casualty. Her stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Story, and Colorado Review, among other journals. She lives in Virginia.
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