Light on Snow - Hardcover

Shreve, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031600071X ISBN 13: 9780316000710

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2004

Synopsis

What makes a family? That's what twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon wonders after she and her widowed father discover a wailing abandoned baby in the snow-filled woods near their New Hampshire home. Through the days that follow, the Dillons and an unexpected visitor who soon turns up at their door-a young woman evidently haunted by her own terrible choices-face a thicket of decisions, each seeming to carry equal possibilities of heartbreak and redemption. Writing with all the emotional resonance that has drawn millions of readers around the world to her fiction, Anita Shreve unfolds in Light on Snow a tender and surprising novel about love and its consequences.

About this title

Review:

Best-selling author Anita Shreve has chosen as her latest protagonist a 12-year-old girl, whose life has not just been touched by tragedy, but blown apart by it. Nicky and her father have moved to a remote house on the outskirts of a remote village somewhere in New Hampshire, following a road accident which has wiped out the rest of their family. Nickyıs father would like to live like a hermit, but recognises, even through his intense grief, that 12-year-olds need many things the world has to offer.

And then, one afternoon, just as the light is beginning to fade, a brief walk in the snow-swept woods surrounding their home ­ and a chance encounter ­ brings father and daughter unexpectedly together. United in their shock at finding a newborn baby wrapped in a bloody sleeping bag, they move heaven and earth to save her life. They manage to get the infant to hospital, yet despite an outpouring of emotion, the pair soon start to fall back into their old ways; tiptoeing carefully around each other, fearing to speak the name of their grief, pretending at normality. Until, that is, a pretty young woman comes knocking on their door and all three are forced to question their motives and look into each otherıs hearts.

Light on Snow is a beautifully sad reflection on life and loss, grief and hope and recognising the time in our lives to forgive others ­ and ourselves ­ and move forward. Anita Shreve has proved once again that she is a gifted exponent of the human psyche and the dual frailty and immense strength of the human spirit.

--Carey Green

Review:

This story touches the very deepest human emotions . . . Chaucerian in its intense sympathy and its appealing universality . . . Shreve's style is fluent and unpretentious, with an irresistible rhythmic and narrative impetus that keeps you up, reading ever faster, all night . . . Perceptive, gripping and ultimately exhilarating, this is a very fine book indeed (Sue Gaisford, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

Anita Shreve's eleventh novel plunges the reader straight into a gripping narrative . . . This is Shreve at her poised best, and her controlled, crisply understated prose makes her emotive subject all the more affecting (DAILY MAIL)

Full of emotional depth, it's not a comfortable read but one that will stay with you a long time. Oprah says that if a book doesn't grab her in the first 50 pages, she moves on. There'll be no need for that ('Read it - Star Choice')

DAILY MIRROR ('Emotionally rich . . . it's the literary equivalent of a snuggly blanket on a snowy night')

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 031600071X
• ISBN 13: 9780316000710
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368