Forgive Me: A Novel [Paperback]

Amanda Eyre Ward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 19, 2007

From the acclaimed author of How to Be Lost comes a gorgeous new novel about love, memory, and motherhood.

Nadine Morgan travels the world as a journalist, covering important events, following dangerous leads, and running from anything that might tie her down. Since an assignment in Cape Town ended in tragedy and regret, Nadine has not returned to South Africa, or opened her heart–until she hears the story of Jason Irving.

Jason, an American student, was beaten to death by angry local youths at the height of the apartheid era. Years later, his mother is told that Jason’s killers have applied for amnesty. Jason’s parents pack their bags and fly from Nantucket to Cape Town. Filled with rage, Jason’s mother resolves to fight the murderers’ pleas for forgiveness.

As Nadine follows the Irvings to beautiful, ghost-filled South Africa, she is flooded with memories of a time when the pull toward adventure and intrigue left her with a broken heart. Haunted by guilt and a sense of remorse, and hoping to lose herself in her coverage of the murder trial, Nadine grows closer to Jason’s mother as well as to the mother of one of Jason’s killers–with profound consequences. In a country both foreign and familiar, Nadine is forced to face long-buried demons, come to terms with the missing pieces of her own family past, and learn what it means to truly love and to forgive.

With her dazzling prose and resonant themes, Amanda Eyre Ward has joined the ranks of such beloved American novelists as Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett. Gripping, darkly humorous, and luminous, Forgive Me is an unforgettable story of dreams and longing, betrayal and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The secret demons of globe-trotting journalist Nadine, 35, form the core of this contrived but earnestly observed third novel from Ward (How to Be Lost). Badly injured by thugs while pursuing a story outside of Mexico City, Nadine wakes up at her estranged father and stepmother-to-be's Cape Cod B&B, under the care of the perhaps too interested Dr. Duarte. The unhappily confined Nadine reads a story about a local couple who are traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings: testifying will be the young, black woman who killed their white son, a visiting American teacher, in 1988. Told to rest by her bureau, Nadine decides to cover the story on her own. On a flight from Nantucket to Cape Town, Nadine finds herself next to the local couple, who furtively give Nadine their son's boyhood journal. It's not Nadine's first trip to Cape Town: she spent years there as a fledgling journalist, and lost her one love, Maxim, there; the soul-wrenching revelations of the murdered man's diary bring Nadine face-to-face with her own personal and professional pasts, and force her to make difficult decisions about her future. A disjointed narrative, stilted dialogue and contrived plot mechanics make hard work of what is otherwise an ambitious morality play.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In her first two novels, Sleep Toward Heaven and How to Be Lost, Amanda Eyre Ward asked questions about loss and forgiveness: Is salvation possible to achieve? What are the costs of achieving it? Does everyone deserve it? Forgive Me, as the title suggests, blatantly explores these questions and other big themes-from apartheid to race, globalization, and motherhood. Filled with plot twists, Ward intersperses Nadine's story with the first-person journal entries of young boy in Nantucket. Her spare, compelling prose touched most critics deeply; as Nadine travels back to South Africa, her own questions also captivated them. In sum, Forgive Me is a page-turner with deep moral underpinnings.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (June 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345494466
• ISBN-13: 978-0345494467
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,773,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ABOUT AMANDA
Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City in 1972. Her family moved to Rye, New York when she was four. Amanda attended Kent School in Kent, CT, where she wrote for the Kent News.

Amanda majored in English and American Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She studied fiction writing with Jim Shepard and spent her junior fall in coastal Kenya. She worked part-time at the Williamstown Public Library. After graduation, Amanda taught at Athens College in Greece for a year, and then moved to Missoula, Montana.

Amanda studied fiction writing at the University of Montana with Bill Kittredge, Dierdre McNamer, Debra Earling, and Kevin Canty, receiving her MFA. After traveling to Egypt, she took a job at the University of Montana Mansfield Library, working in Inter Library Loan.

In 1998, Amanda moved to Austin, Texas where she began working on Sleep Toward Heaven. She wrote for the Austin Chronicle and worked for a variety of Internet startups. In 1999, Amanda won third prize in the Austin Chronicle short story contest with her story Miss Montana's Wedding Day.

She published Butte as in Beautiful that same year.

In July, 2000, Amanda married the geologist Tip Meckel in Ouray, Colorado.

They spent a summer in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Amanda wrote the short stories The Beginning of the Wrong Novel and Classified.

During that summer, Amanda finished Sleep Toward Heaven, which was published in 2003. Sleep Toward Heaven won the Violet Crown Book Award and was optioned for film by Sandra Bullock and Fox Searchlight. To promote Sleep Toward Heaven, Amanda, her baby, and her mother Mary-Anne Westley traveled to London and Paris.

Amanda moved to Waterville, Maine, where she wrote in an attic filled with books. Amanda's second novel, How to Be Lost, was published in 2004. How to Be Lost was selected as a Target Bookmarked pick, and has been published in fifteen countries.

After one year in Maine and two years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Amanda and her family returned to Austin, Texas.

To research her third novel, Forgive Me, Amanda traveled with her sister, Liza Ward Bennigson, to Cape Town, South Africa. Forgive Me was published in 2007.

Amanda's short story collection, Love Stories in This Town, was published in April, 2009.

Her new novel, Close Your Eyes, will be published in July, 2011.

Amanda currently writes every morning and spends afternoons with her two young boys.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible read!, June 25, 2007

By 

Juli Berwald (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forgive Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Ward's ambitious third novel is by far my favorite. Just as in her previous books, Ward has an amazing ability to tackle tough topics with an effortless writing style. As always, her ability to write different voices is completely on target. In particular, I found the character of Nadine extremely compelling; I was fascinated by her simultaneous toughness and vulnerability. And the plot, well, it blew me away. Enjoy this book - it's an incredible read!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A FASCINATING JOURNEY TOWARD REDEMPTION, September 20, 2007

By 

B. Case "InquiringMind" (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forgive Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Nadine Morgan, the character at the heart of Amanda Eyre Ward's latest novel "Forgive Me," is not a likeable protagonist--but that's the whole point. This is a book about forgiveness. Before redemption can occur, the main character has to live through, and eventually realize the extent of her wrongdoings. Readers are able take a fictional journey with her during this process. Along the way, we get to know a woman with a seriously flawed moral compass--a woman who consistently gets into situations in which she walks all over people's innermost feelings. Eventually, we arrive with her at her moment of self-discovery--the point in her life when she begins to see the errors of her ways and starts to imagine a path toward redemption.

This is a very interesting journey, and obviously it is one that most people would never make on their own. Thankfully, we have fiction to take us there!

We come into Nadine's life when she is 35 years old. She is already a successful career journalist who specializes in getting the tough stories in the bloodiest and most dangerous corners of the world. The book starts near Mexico City, where Nadine is beaten to within an inch of her life by drug lords. The next thing she knows, she is in her hometown, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, being cared for by her father and his live-in girlfriend. She panics and wants out immediately. She's an adrenaline junkie missing out on whole world of action-packed news stories. For Nadine, Woods Hole might as well be Hell. She can't stand living with her father and his companion. She starts to detest her childhood best friend for her simple homemaker's life. Out of desperation, more than anything else, Nadine has an affair with Hank, the doctor who is taking care of her. He ends up falling in love with her. But she abandons him, and all the other loving people in Woods Hole that care so much about her. She does this so easily and thoughtlessly it takes your breath away. Before you know it, Nadine is flying off to South Africa to follow a developing page-one news story.

The rest of the novel deals with two fast-paced interlocking stories: one full of some of the worst that the world can offer in manipulation, betrayal, and physical violence, the other full of childhood innocence. The juxtaposition and symbiosis of these two completely antithetical storylines creates enormous tension. It helps that the reader is allowed to keep one foot in a world of innocent childhood normalcy, while the other is uncomfortably dangling in an unsavory and violent world most of us would rather know as little about as possible.

In South Africa, Nadine tries to get the best angle possible on a big international news article about two grieving American parents returning to South Africa to fight against amnesty for their son's killers. It's been ten years since a mob of black South African teenagers murdered their son and the perpetrators were sent to jail. At the time, it was at the height of Apartheid. Ironically, the young American had come to South Africa to fight against Apartheid, but he was killed merely because he was white and in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The secondary storyline consists of excerpts from a journal entitled "Nantucket to Stardom." It is best not to reveal too much about this journal, even though it takes up a considerable portion of the novel's overall content. Trust that this second storyline is important, and don't overlook the details. All will make sense in the end.

Don't read this novel if you hope to gain insight into the history of Apartheid. This novel will tell you (perhaps more than you may want to know) about routine atrocities that were committed during that time, but Ward will not give you any insight into the political environment that surrounded that era. Ward never tarries from her focus relentlessly pushing the plot forward.

What Ward does best here is character development. In this book, the author creates Nadine Morgan, a completely believable antiheroine. Then, the author has the skill to artfully and carefully redeem her.

Don't expect everything to be tied together neatly at the end. Ward loves to leave her readers with loose ends to ponder. She wants her readers to be thinking about her books long after they finish the last page. Has Nadine truly been redeemed? Can she truly change her basic nature? What will become of her in the years ahead? I like that--an author demanding the participation of the reader after the novel is completed. I will definitely continue to look for more work by this author in the future.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GREAT SURPRISE AT THE END!, July 1, 2007

By 

R. A. Taylor "avid reader" (FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Forgive Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Ms. Ward has written an interesting story about Nadine Morgan, a journalist who has traveled the world in search of the next big story, making sure nothing and no one ties her down. After being badly beaten while in search of a story in Mexico, she returns to Cape Cod to the home of her father and his girlfriend. Nadine's mother died when she was quite young and she was raised by a father who dealth with his grief by pouring himself into his work. While recovering on Cape Cod, her meets Dr. Duarte who is taking care of her injuries. There is a mutual attraction between the two. But first Nadine feels she must return to South Africa where she left 10 years ago following a tragedy. She is going to South Africa to attend the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings regarding the death of Jason Irving, a teacher from Cape Cod. Jason's parents are flying to South Africa to attend the TRC and Nadine is determined to interview them.

This story is told in the present (mid 1990's) and in flashbacks, along with interesting entries from a journal. I am embarrassed to admit that before this book I had read nothing about apartheid. Ms. Ward tells in gripping details some of the atrocities carried out by both sides, atrocities I will not soon forget. Overall I thought this was a good book. The story was interesting. I felt the characters were well drawn and fully developed. And I particularly liked the way the author pulled everything together in the end, along with a surprise I did not see coming. I would recommend this book to family and friends.