About Grace
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3.8 • 40 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
About Grace is the brilliant debut novel from Anthony Doerr, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning All The Light We Cannot See.
Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family’s home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach.
Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love, at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy. They flee south, landing in Ohio, where their daughter Grace is born. And then the visions of Grace’s death begin for Winkler, as their waterside home is inundated. Plagued by the same horrific images of Grace drowning, when the floods come, he cannot face his destiny and flees.
He beaches on a remote Caribbean island, where he works as a handyman, chipping away at his doubts and hopes, never knowing whether Grace survived the flood or met the doom he foretold. After two decades, he musters the strength to find out…
Reviews
‘'I loved this wonderful book – its strangeness, its obsessiveness, its beautiful sentences.' Monica Ali
’Doerr's sublime renditions of Winkler's attunement to the world around him turn his story into a prolonged epiphany, a blissful parable about grace. This is a formidable literary achievement that, link Winkler's snow crystals, integrates facets and dimensions into near-perfect whole.' Independent
‘Doerr's gifts as a stylist are powerfully in evidence: his writing is crystalline, his attention to detail intense and evocative. That Doerr is a writer of exceptional gifts is not in question,
and there is much to admire in this novel.' Daily Telegraph
'Doerr writes wonderfully, lyrically, of the natural world, and his observations of water, snowflakes and clouds illuminate this impressive debut.' Guardian
‘Exceptional first novel. I hesitate to say this book will take your breath away because it's such a cliché; but, really, I promise you, it will… I can't remember when a novel so entranced me. The only criticism I can really muster – and it is rather a limp one – is that About Grace is almost inhumanely faultless; almost, but, even then, not quite.' Evening Standard
’In careful, measured prose conjures a sense of awe both humbling and salutary. It has the bleak, lucid beauty of a day of midwinter light. At its best when describing the minute, disregarded miracles of the natural world, it lingers in the mind like one of the protagonist's eerie dreams.' Daily Mail
‘About Grace is an intriguing exploration of fate and chance’ The Times
About the author
Anthony Doerr’s published his first book, ‘The Shell Collector’, a collection of short stories in 2002. He is 32 and lives in Idaho, where he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Boise State University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift. So why does so little seem to happen in this beautiful, ponderous and sometimes monotonous first novel by the author of the exquisite collection The Shell Collector? David Winkler has seen glimpses of the future ever since he was a boy. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, he dreams of his future wife; soon they meet, fall in love and run away to Ohio, where she gives birth to their daughter, Grace. But when he dreams that he fails to save Grace from a flood, Winkler abandons wife and child, hoping to flee the future. He becomes a hermetic handyman on a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, befriended by a local family. The years pass until, emboldened by his surrogate family's grown daughter, a gifted marine biologist, Winkler realizes that he must embark on a journey to discover if Grace is alive. This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story.
Customer Reviews
About Grace
A wonderful book. If you are prepared to suspend belief to some extent and allow
yourself to be swept along on an exquisite literary journey...then you are in for real treat. I couldn't stop reading it but like his later novel All The Light You Cannot See it may well draw you back again to reread parts again. I have given it four stars simply because All The Light...is superior in its construction and content and I would have wanted to give the full 5 stars to that book.