When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but sincere relationship. She is a nurse, he a house painter, and while both are still young and hopeful about this new love, each of them carries an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and just recently her beloved grandmother--who helped to raise her-passed away. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland, and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more ...
Read More
When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but sincere relationship. She is a nurse, he a house painter, and while both are still young and hopeful about this new love, each of them carries an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and just recently her beloved grandmother--who helped to raise her-passed away. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland, and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more deeply troubled past. In this powerful story of guilt and privacy, Seiffert asks: To love someone, must you know everything about them?
Read Less
quietly stunning novel. The point of view shifts between Alice and Joseph, the new man in her life. Alice's past--a father she never knew in childhood and who rejected her again later, a self-absorbed stepfather, a grandfather who was civil but detached--has made her long even more than most of us for an intimate relationship. Things seem to be moving along swimmingly until Alice intuits that Joseph is hiding something about his stint as a soldier in Northern Ireland. And when her grandfather begins to open up to Joseph, the novel--and Joseph--explodes.
Seiffert's spare, clean style is perfectly suited to her subject matter. She gets relationships and the way they work just right and makes her points about war through them instead of through polemic. Best novel I've read so far this year, and it will be hard to beat.
