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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
July 2010
On Sale: July 6, 2010
252 pages
ISBN: 0618735437
EAN: 9780618735433
Hardcover
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Fiction
Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's
finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional
terrain of his major books--The Bird Artist, The Museum
Guard, and The Haunting of L--in this erotically charged and
morally complex story. Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when
his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two
different bridges--the result of their separate involvements
with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard
operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to
move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle,
aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda. Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering
passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival
of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel.
Actual historical incidents--including a German U-boat's
sinking of the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on
which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be
traveling--lend intense narrative power to Norman's
uncannily layered story.
Wyatt's account of the astonishing--not least to him--events
leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out
twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks
profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime
and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience
of one. An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his
celebrated best.
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