On Sale: Mar 30, 1999
Page Count: 304 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN-13: 9780316601955

$18.99

$24.99 CAD

Format

Format:

Buy from Other Retailers:

Anita Shreve’s hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the ‘impossibility of knowing another person.’

As a pilot’s wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.

Until now, Kathryn Lyons’s life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time.

As Kathryn struggles with her grief, she descends into a maelstrom of publicity stirred up by the modern hunger for the details of tragedy. Even before the plane is located in waters off the Irish coast, the relentless scrutiny of her husband’s life begins to bring a bizarre personal mystery into focus. Could there be any truth to the increasingly disturbing rumors that he had a secret life?

Genre:

By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Anita Shreve

About the Author

Anita Shreve passed away on Thursday, March 29 after a long and very private fight with cancer. Anita was the author of 18 novels, 14 of which were published by Little, Brown, beginning with Resistance in 1997. Her novel The Weight of Water won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 1999, Oprah Winfrey selected The Pilot’s Wife for Oprah’s Book Club, and it went on to sell more than 3 million copies. In all of her work, Anita deftly explored the intricacies and nuances of relationships between men and women, often hinging on the ripple effects of a single, dramatic moment. She wrote the details of history, from the 19th century to the 1920s to World War II, as if she had lived them herself.

Of her novel Rescue, Augusten Borroughs said, “Her prose is so flawlessly disciplined and elegant; the characters seem too real to be made out of words and the story she unfolds is gripping, fiercely intelligent and deeply moving.” These words describe the work but also Anita herself. Anita was a beloved figure for all of us who had the privilege of working with her. She was both elegant and modest, kind, funny, and always observant of every nuance of human interaction. She had impeccable taste and was a thoughtful gift-giver, with a warm laugh and an abiding love for her Boston Red Sox, the Maine coastline, the occasional light beer, and, above all, her children. She was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and friend and we will miss her deeply. Our thoughts are with her family in this difficult time.

Learn more about this author

×

Contributors

Formats and Prices

Price