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Knopf
September 2007
On Sale: September 4, 2007
352 pages ISBN: 0375412816 EAN: 9780375412813 Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s
Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her
as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives
of women. Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes
us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the
breaking point. Expertly, with the keen introspection and
psychological nuance that are her hallmarks, she explores
what happens when there are inequities between friends and
when the hard-won balances of a long relationship are
disturbed, perhaps irreparably, by a harrowing
crisis.
Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in
the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as
sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls
were just sixteen. In the decades that followed—through
Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through
Sarabeth’s attempts to make a happy life for herself despite
the shadow cast by her mother’s act—their relationship
remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz’s
adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to
engulf the family, the fault lines in the women’s friendship
are revealed, and both Liz and Sarabeth are forced to
reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their
connection. Songs Without Words is about the
sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest
relationships, about the familial myths that shape us both
as children and as parents, and about the limits—and the
power—of the friendships we create when we are young.
Once again, Ann Packer has written a novel of
singular force and complexity: thoughtful, moving, and
absolutely gripping, it more than confirms her prodigious
literary gifts.
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