Sweet Water Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Sweet Water Book

In Vermont a dowser detects a strongbox filled with diaries and letters, a cache that suggests that expatriate 19th-century novelist O. had a decades-long romance with American Lucinda Dearborn. These documents share some eerie parallels with the lives of the present owners of Thrush Hollow, the crumbling Vermont hotel Lucinda once ran. Ned and Greta Dene are experiencing subliminal marital difficulties. Greta's longtime lover, Crain, whom she believes to be the father of her son, Henry, has just died in a plane crash. Ned first met Greta in France when she was 16 and suffering from stigmata that erupted soon after a young Crain returned to Mexico to wed Julia. By the novel's end, Greta invites the widow Julia and her children to visit Thrush Hollow. The secrets Julia confides in Greta upend her world and her stigmata return. Ned, a historian by trade, recognizes the scholarly importance (and the tabloid potential) of the O. and Lucinda documents, but is reluctant to disclose their existence to the world at large. Kathryn Kramer confides to her readers what Lucinda did not record in her diaries--despite her intellectual devotion to O., she had a longstanding, zestily consummated affair with a local harness-maker, Zebulon Snow. It is only after Lucinda drowns herself, following O.'s death abroad, that Zeb discovers their union produced a stillborn child. If all of this sounds fantastically complicated, well, it is. Secret upon secret unfurls as Kramer's Jamesian sentences meander toward the final period: She had thought of how, once, the sea had covered the land, how its hollows and slopes had felt the sea's penetration and caress; no emptiness had been left unfilled, so that, ever since the water had receded, the brooks and rivers travelling to the sea had molded the hills with their longing to return, and everywhere the character of the land had been shaped by this striving: to go back, sweet water joining to salt, back to where neither knew where one stopped and the other began. In this, her third novel, Kramer requires patience of her readers and rewards it with the byzantine intricacies of her fictional edifice. --Joyce Thompson Read More

from£27.54 | RRP: £16.63
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £5.67
  • Product Description

    In her powerfully engrossing new novel, Kathryn Kramer (called by the New York Times "a storyteller to whom we willingly submit") explores the American way of love via two romantic triangles. One is taking place now (a skeptical horsewoman, a passionate biographer, an international financier) and the other a hundred years ago, at the same Vermont resort hotel.
    As the plot unfolds, the secrets embedded in the two romances work their way to the surface: newly discovered love letters, addressed in the last century to an earlier proprietress of the hotel, a Miss Lucinda Dearborn, not only turn out to be from America's greatest expatriate novelist but also point to Lucinda's unsuspected lifelong affair with another man.
    In the present, mysterious events that occurred the winter the current owners of the hotel, Ned and Greta Dene, met as teenagers, threaten to overwhelm their lives once again when Greta's first and greatest love disappears in a plane crash and the priest who brought about their meeting reappears, as if on cue.
    As the story progresses, the distance between what happened in the past and what is happening now begins to close, and Lucinda Dearborn's amazing and ultimately tragic story illuminates Greta and Ned's summer of crisis.
    Sweet Water is a spacious novel, rich in event and the feel of America--Civil War boys returning from the fighting, the hotel's famous water cures, a woman galloping her horse across the hills, a Catholic priest who presides over a miracle he doesn't believe in, an old-fashioned diviner who goes looking for water and turns up the letters that set everything in motion.
    It is also a literary detective story, a brilliant and gripping novel about the ways in which love can be fueled or destroyed by secrets, about the distances between men and women, and about the extraordinary and unexpected ways in which faith between them is engendered.

  • 0375400834
  • 9780375400834
  • Kathryn Kramer
  • 1 August 1998
  • Alfred A. Knopf
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 307
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.