A chance encounter on a train leads to a series of events that culminate in a confrontation between reality and illusion and a tense exploration of the workings of memory and desire. This haunting literary thriller about a woman obsessed with a figure from her past is in the tradition of "Vertigo" and "The Return of Martin Guerre."
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Florey, sets this, her sixth novel, inside the mind of Christine Ward, a contemporary painter who lives with an eccentric pizza-maker named James in New Haven, Conn. Christine, finally living a calm, happy, albeit superficial, life after years of mental instability, travels to Manhattan one day to have lunch with her French ex-mother-in-law and to meet a gallery owner. The day changes her life: snooping in a fellow train traveler's Filofax, she sees the very uncommon name of her dead best friend, a hipped-out, left-wing charmer she knew at Oberlin. She begins an odyssey to discover if he is in fact dead, a search that quickly becomes an exploration of her sanity, and the depths of her unhappiness. Florey writes with straightforward simplicity, and readers will quickly find themselves not only laughing with Christine at her own absurdity, but feeling her bleak, chronic pain. Soon obsessed with not only her friend's death, but her brother's, she succumbs to the instability that deprived her of her only child. Through almost the entire book, Florey manages to balance the ambiguity of events with Christine's clarity in the face of them. If the rather tentative ending falters, it still does not lessen Florey's achievement.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A chilling, eloquent novel that draws you in with mystery and holds you there with love, obsession, failure, insanity, and an enchanting hybrid of past and present...Florey infuses her typically irresistible characters with a depth and darkness that gives her newest work a coherent vision and lasting effect." -- Kirkus Reviews
"A smart, stylish, compelling thriller that remains, right to the end, as deeply mysterious as the subjects (identity, obsession, and desire) that drive its narrative." -- Rick Russo, author of "Nobody's Fool"
"An uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis." -- Feminist Bookstore News -- Publisher Comments
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