Simon & Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 5, 2011
Featuring: Holly; Wylie Greer
240 pages ISBN: 1451643195 EAN: 9781451643190 Paperback Add to Wish List
What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss,
and, most of all, longing. In 1976, on the day of his wife's
funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter,
Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of
Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a
little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before
Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what
I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do
to make him come back." What You Have Left is about a father
and daughter trying to make their way back to one another
across decades of uncertainty and ambivalence -- all the
while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth
salvaging. It's also the story of a grandfather bent on
suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken
amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars,
cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions,
never quite live up to their own expectations. Are we doomed
to repeat our parents' mistakes? Can lies save love instead
of destroying it? Is letting go the same as giving up? Shot
through with sly humor and a knowing sympathy for human
weakness, What You Have Left takes up these and other
questions as it examines the weight of history, the nature
of loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Making use of
bold shifts in viewpoint and time, Allison proves a
brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down
from parent to child and the ways loss defines us. This
stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly
as it is -- in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger
and humility, its despair and hope.
Written in three voices, that of the daughter, the father, and the daughter's husband, this novel is heart-wrenching as well as eye-opening. Will Allison does a great job of weaving a complex family story together that readers will find moving and emotional. (Sharon Galligar Chance 12:38pm November 2, 2011)
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