About Grace [Paperback]

Anthony Doerr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2005

Beautifully written and compelling, About Grace is the brilliant debut novel from Anthony Doerr. Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family's home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach. Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love, at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy. They flee south, landing in Ohio, where their daughter Grace is born. And then the visions of Grace's death begin for Winkler, as their waterside home is inundated. Plagued by the same horrific images of Grace drowning, when the floods come, he cannot face his destiny and flees. He beaches on a remote Caribbean island, where he works as a handyman, chipping away at his doubts and hopes, never knowing whether Grace survived the flood or met the doom he foretold. After two decades, he musters the strength to find out!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation—all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift. So why does so little seem to happen in this beautiful, ponderous and sometimes monotonous first novel by the author of the exquisite collection The Shell Collector? David Winkler has seen glimpses of the future ever since he was a boy. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, he dreams of his future wife; soon they meet, fall in love and run away to Ohio, where she gives birth to their daughter, Grace. But when he dreams that he fails to save Grace from a flood, Winkler abandons wife and child, hoping to flee the future. He becomes a hermetic handyman on a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, befriended by a local family. The years pass until, emboldened by his surrogate family's grown daughter, a gifted marine biologist, Winkler realizes that he must embark on a journey to discover if Grace is alive. This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In his award-winning short story collection The Shell Collector (2002), Doerr drew a vast, gorgeous portrait of the natural world’s effects on the human condition. Here, he pays the same painstaking attention to detail, from descriptions of snowflakes to "tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles." Yet, the intricate, nature-driven plots that captivated readers in The Shell Collector fall short here. Critics agree that Doerr sacrifices a plausible storyline, which takes place over two decades, for setting. The characters seem authentic, but Winkler’s lack of self-forgiveness and ill-conceived search for Grace frustrated most critics. Yet, if About Grace seems short on plot, it’s worth reading for its lyrical descriptions of nature.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 000714699X
• ISBN-13: 978-0007146994
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,939,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Doerr's books have been a NY Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, a 'Book of the Year' in the Washington Post, and he has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the Story Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award three times. Doerr's stories have appeared in lots of magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His newest book is a collection of six stories called Memory Wall. Visit him at www.anthonydoerr.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unsettling and beautiful, January 14, 2006

By 

Bunny Bunsen, PhD (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Grace: A Novel (Paperback)

I was initially conflicted over purchasing this book based on some of the reviews I read; however, I could not resist the synopsis and had to find out for myself what this book was all about.

I did not find this work to be disappointing in the least. I would describe the book as haunting, OBSESSIVE, and tender, wrapped in cloaks of great love and forgiveness. It is an amazing physical and emotional journey of a man with an unusual gift that often torments him and plunges him into the throes of despair and ruin. At the same time, his eyes are opened to the little yet significant miracles that surround him everyday.

This book is written in a lovely prose with painstaking descriptions of articles of everyday life. It is continuously unsettling and maintains the reader's attention to the very end. A very fine work and highly recommended!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, and of death", December 27, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: About Grace: A Novel (Hardcover)

In this highly symbolical novel, author Anthony Doerr boldly poses metaphysical questions about life, death, the human condition, and the ties that inevitably bind families together. Doerr has a beautifully structured style, and the narrative of About Grace is full of some of the most spectacular imagery, but the meaning behind the tale is often shrouded in the abstract and the mysterious. Memory, dreams, water, and the inescapable lust for life form the thematic core of this novel as David Winkler, the often-embattled main protagonist of the story, voluntarily exiles himself far away from his family and the life he is familiar with.

David has a terrible problem. A chronic sleepwalker and a gifted hydrologist, he dreams about things before they happen, and the dreams are often terrible portents to death and disaster. He dreams of a man getting hit by a bus, he dreams he's on an airplane, returning home after twenty-five years, and dreams he's on an island dreaming of the future. But when he dreams that he will inadvertently kill his daughter Grace, while trying to save her in a flood, he becomes obsessed with protecting her. He sees Grace suffocating in his arms and realizes that his dreams are ordained perhaps by chance, or choice, or the complexities of some unfathomably large pattern.

Fearing Grace's death, Winkler leaves her and his wife Sandy behind and jumps on a ship that is headed to the Caribbean in an attempt to stop the dream from becoming reality. During his twenty-five year exile, David writes obsessive letters to Sandy begging to find out whether Grace is still alive, and is befriended by two Chilean exiles Felix and Soma, whose daughter Naaliyah comes to support him in unexpected and surprising ways.

Winkler becomes a reclusive island hermit who is wracked by guilt at what he has done. He goes from being a confident weatherman with a family to a type of disparate lost soul, where he lives his days and nights struggling against sleep, time and guilt - existing only for a flicker of hope that his daughter is still alive. He ekes out a living doing trivial jobs, working on construction sites, and relying on the good-hearted generosity of others.

Winkler eventually returns to the United States in search of redemption, forgiveness, and to find out whether Grace is still alive. The journey he embarks on takes him on an epic road trip across continental United States, to the blistery wintry darkness of northern Alaska, and back to Anchorage where his life journey started all those years earlier. Doerr cleverly likens Winker's experiences to the natural world. Winkler is a scientist obsessed with snowflakes and other forms of water, but he is also a man who is unmistakably human and frail. And like the snowflakes he studies, he is remarkably resilient to the world around him. David discovers that life is just like the ice crystals he studies - the basic design is so icily repeated and unerringly conforming. The filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars have a ghastly inevitability; both the crystals and humans cannot escape their embedded blueprints.

Whether he is describing the intricate arms of these snowflakes or the unending beauty of a tropical sunset, Doerr's powers of description are formidable and his ability to evoke the passions of the ever-changing natural world are unsurpassed. About Grace is a powerful story about family - "family is truth, struggle, retribution and time" - and also the ability to forgive. Through the power of redemption, David is able to better understand the meaning of life and more fully appreciate the beauty of the natural world that constantly encompasses us. Mike Leonard December 04.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Haruki Murakami..., May 1, 2007

By 

J. Pierpont Finch "man about town" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Grace : A Novel (Paperback)

I just finished this novel on a trip back from Phoenix, and I have to say not only the style and description, but the plot itself grabbed me. Unlike other reviews here, I found nothing plodding about the story. I found it riveting, and full of surprises. I'm a big fan of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, and I found a numbeer of similarities in both the beauty of the language, as well thematic and plot. There are elements of a surreal sort of journey and a search for a missing life that spans across thousands of miles. Doerr does a great job of shifting his tale between several key time periods in the life of David Winkler, the main character of the story. This is a brilliant novel, and I plan to share it with friends.