The Love That Split the World - Softcover

Henry, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595148515 ISBN 13: 9781595148513

Verlag: Razorbill, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

"A truly profound debut."—Buzzfeed

"A time-bending suspense that's contemplative and fresh, evocative and gripping."—USA Today

"Henry's story captivates, both as a romance and as an imaginative rethinking of time and space."—Publishers Weekly

"This time-traveling, magical, and beautifully written love story definitely deserves a spot on your bookshelf."—Bustle 

Emily Henry's stunning debut novel is Friday Night Lights meets The Time Traveler's Wife and perfectly captures those bittersweet months after high school, when we dream not only of the future, but of all the roads and paths we've left untaken.
 
Natalie's last summer in her small Kentucky hometown is off to a magical start . . . until she starts seeing the "wrong things." They're just momentary glimpses at first—her front door is red instead of its usual green, there’s a preschool where the garden store should be. But then her whole town disappears for hours, fading away into rolling hills and grazing buffalo, and Nat knows something isn't right.
 
Then there are the visits from the kind but mysterious apparition she calls "Grandmother," who tells her, "You have three months to save him." The next night, under the stadium lights of the high school football field, she meets a beautiful boy named Beau, and it's as if time just stops and nothing exists. Nothing, except Natalie and Beau.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily Henry is full-time writer, proofreader, and donut connoisseur. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. She tweets @EmilyHenryWrite.

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1

The night before my last official day of high school, she comes back. I feel her in my room before I even open my eyes. That’s how it’s always been.

“Wake up, Natalie,” she whispers, but she knows I’m awake—if a fly buzzed in the hallway, I’d wake up—just like she knows the drooling, snoring rug of a Saint Bernard at the foot of my bed, the watchdog Mom and Dad got to help me sleep better, will keep drooling and snoring through our entire conversation.

I open my eyes on darkness, push back the covers, and sit up. The crickets are thrumming outside my window, and the blue-green moonlight shines through the foliage across my carpet.

There she is, sitting in the rocking chair in the corner, as she has every time she’s visited me since I was a little girl. Her ancient features are shrouded in night, her thick, gray-black hair loose down her shoulders. She wears the same ash-colored clothes as always, and though it’s been nearly three years, she looks no older than the last time I saw her, or even the first time I saw her. If anything, she might look a little younger. Probably because I’m older, and generally less terrified of wrinkles and age spots than I used to be.

I contemplate screaming—twisting the knob on the bedside lamp, doing anything my eighteen years have taught me will make Them disappear, just to teach her a lesson for leaving me for so long, for letting me think she was finally gone for good.

But despite my bitterness, I don’t want her to vanish, so I stay still.

“Nice of you to stop by,” I whisper. The words hurt my throat, which hasn’t woken up yet. My vision’s still settling too, piecing together the wrinkled details of her face, the laugh lines around her mouth, and the sweet crow’s-feet at the corners of her dark eyes. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been right here,” she says. It’s one of her typical, cryptic answers.

“It’s been almost three years.”

“Not for me it hasn’t.”

Again—for the thousandth time—I survey her tattered shawl and the threadbare dress hanging on her bony body. “No,” I say, “you’re outside of time, aren’t you?”

Her right shoulder shifts in a shrug. “Your words, not mine. Have any others come to see you?”

I rub the heels of my hands over my eye sockets, stalling for time. I’m ashamed to admit that no one’s come and that I know exactly why. Though I want to be mad at her for abandoning me, it’s my fault I haven’t seen her in three years. I caused her disappearance. But it doesn’t matter whether I admit it or not—she already knows everything anyway. As if to prove that point, she says, “I think Gus farted.”

I lean over the bed and look down at the shaggy dog. His tongue is lolling in his sleep, and his perpetually oozing nose is busily sniffing. One of his back legs starts to kick in response to a dream, and the horrible smell she must’ve been referring to hits me.

I cover my nose with my forearm. “Ugh, Gus. You’re a monster, and I love you, and you’re disgusting.”

I wait for the worst of the odor to pass before I answer her question. “There haven’t been others. They’re all gone. Dr. Langdon thought the EMDR therapy worked. She said that’s why you stopped coming. Apparently any trauma I had was resolved. I’m a lucky girl. Or I was until five seconds ago.”

EMDR: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It’s a type of psychotherapy used to treat the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and, in my case, to shut out the woman in front of me and the various others who’ve appeared at my bedside over the years.

She thinks for a moment. “You know, just a moment ago—a moment for me, that is, three years for you—I told you something about Dr. Langdon. Did you pass it along?”

I keep staring hard at her.

“Do you remember what I told you, Natalie?” she presses.

I nod once. “You said she would die in a fire.”

“And?”

“She’s still alive,” I supply. “She also suggested I try Ativan, though of course Mom didn’t approve. Apparently this is just a stressful time in a teenager’s life.”

God—the private name I gave her years ago, though she insists I call her Grandmother—laughs and looks down at her weathered hands, folded in her lap. “Girl, you have no idea.”

“Were you ever my age?” I ask.

Her thick eyebrows rise up over her cloudy dark eyes. “Yes,” she says quietly.

“And it was stressful?”

She jams her mouth shut. “When I was your age, I knew nothing. Nothing about myself, nothing about the universe or about heartbreak. I remember being terrified to grow up, afraid of losing my friends, sure I’d lose my mind. Life felt like a blender that wanted to eat me. But the things that happened to me when I was just a little bit older than you are—those things made the blender feeling seem like a bubble bath.”

I look down at the tear in my quilt. Mom made this blanket from a pattern while my birth mother was pregnant with me. It was going to belong to a different baby, from an adoption that fell through. Instead, it became mine when I became my parents’. “I missed you,” I tell Grandmother.

“I missed you too.”

“I thought you said it was only a minute for you.”

“It was.”

For a while we’re both silent, staring at one another. Then she asks, “How are the twins?”

“Good,” I tell her. “Coco’s transferring to a performing arts high school next year. Jack’s still playing football. Mom’s so proud of us all that she’s liable to explode any day now, so that’s good. At the end of summer she and Dad are taking us to San Francisco then up to Seattle.” The trip is a tradition they’ve had since they got married. Mom had never really traveled anywhere before, and her only reservation about marrying Dad was that she knew he loved Kentucky so much he’d never leave. They were poor then, but Dad still promised they’d see the world, or, at the very least, the continental U.S. Thus the annual Cleary Family Road Trip was born.

Grandmother closes her eyes for a long moment, and their corners crinkle prettily when they open. “I thought this year was Boulder down through Denver and into Mesa Verde,” she says. “Jack gets food poisoning, and Coco won’t eat anywhere that’s not a chain after that.”

“That was last year,” I say. “This year it’s all Highway 101. Probably a good time to buy stock in Dramamine, if you’re looking for a hot tip.”

“And you? How are you?”

“I’m great. Moving to Rhode Island in August, to go to Brown—but you probably already knew that.”

She nods, and again we fall into stillness and silence. I’ve missed this feeling, of sitting awake at night with her while the rest of the world dreams. The last three years have felt chaotic without these moments of quiet.

“Is it true that God leaves you when you grow up?” I ask. “Is that why I haven’t seen you?”

“I’ve never said I was God.”

It’s true—she’s avoided the question of what exactly she is since she first appeared when I was six, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Razorbill
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1595148515
• ISBN 13: 9781595148513
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar