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Published Jun 2010
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the author of I Was Amelia Earhart, a luminous love story that winds through several generations—told in Jane Mendelsohn’s distinctive mesmerizing style.
At its center are Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq War confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist, a former dancer. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.
As Milo’s treatment progresses, the images begin to weave together into an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories. There are Joe and Pearl, a husband and wife in the 1930s whose marriage is tested by Pearl’s bewitching artistic cousin, Vivian. There is the heartrending story of a woman photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life’s work. The picaresque life of a woman who has a child too young and finds herself always on the move from job to job and man to man. And the story of a man and a woman in seventeenth-century Turkey—a eunuch and a sultan’s concubine—whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America’s endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo’s own love.
"This intriguing book will be particularly appealing to readers with vivid imaginations who are open to a more innovative narrative style." - Library Journal
"The fallout from Joe and Vivian's messy affair connects back to present day, yet the music evoked by this ponderously embellished work remains a vague, distant noise." - Publishers Weekly
"A magically consoling reminder that beneath the starkest case of wounding and healing is the music of love lost and found." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. In her exquisite, psychologically fluent novels, the actual and the imagined merge as Mendelsohn tests the power of stories to define, guide, and sometimes destroy us." - Booklist
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jane Mendelsohn is an American author. Her first novel was the critically acclaimed international bestseller I Was Amelia Earhart. Born and raised in New York City, she attended the Horace Mann School and Yale, where she was a Connecticut Student Poet and graduated summa cum laude. After attending Yale Law School for one year, she left to pursue writing. She began publishing literary reviews in the Village Voice in 1990. Since then, her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and the London Review of Books.
Her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, was published by Knopf in 1996 and became a New York Times best seller. It was translated into many languages and short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Innocence, ...
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