Awake - Hardcover

Graver, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805065393 ISBN 13: 9780805065398

Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Once a painter, a traveller, a lover of light, Anna Simon has been living in the dark ever since she gave birth to Max, a child with a rare genetic disease for whom even an hour in sunlight could prove fatal. For years, Anna has home schooled Max and structured her life around his, despite the fact that her husband, Ian, favours mainstreaming. When Anna learns of a camp in upstate New York for children with the disease, she sees room for a compromise-a sanctuary for Max, a place where he can interact with other children and be both safe and free. And so the summer that Max is nine, the family heads off to Camp Tuna. At first, it seems like the answer to their problems. But as Anna is drawn into life there and gets to know Hal, the camp's charismatic founder, freedom and safety prove to be complicated things. What begins as a novel about a mother with a sick child quickly becomes an intricate examination of one woman's identity as Anna-given sudden breathing room-looks around at her life and finds that she has lost track of essential pieces of herself. What, exactly, are safety and freedom? And at what cost-to one's self and the people in one's life-should they be protected and pursued?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Graver is the author of Unravelling and The Honey Thief, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, as well as in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Boston College.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Excerpt from Awake by Elizabeth Graver. Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth Graver. Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.


If I were a different sort of person, this would be the story of my son and the sanctuary we found for him. It would be a tale of healing—if not of the body, then of the soul.

But what if a mother gets an itch, a yen? What if she tires of the tending, loses faith in the healing, needs a break? People in the paid workforce get vacations. Daycare providers get them, and nurses. Teachers take sabbaticals and leaves. What if the mother, who for years has checked and checked and checked her sick boy’s skin, watches the boy run off with his new friends and starts to notice her own skin again, the way it keens for something, wants? What if she finds herself split down the middle? Now she is two people, or even more—two mothers, two women in love with two men and with solitude itself, a person at once meshed and floating, coming and going, here and there. It should be disturbing, but it isn’t, not at first. She’s too happy. Brimming. Her love is wide and generous; she’s got more than enough to go around.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805065393
• ISBN 13: 9780805065398
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar