About Grace : a novel

by Anthony Doerr

Paper Book, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

Fiction Doerr

Barcode

12980

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

New York : Scribner, 2015

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML:The first novel by Anthony Doerr, the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning author of Cloud Cuckoo Land, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, one of the most beautiful, wise, and compelling debuts of recent times. David Winkler begins life in Anchorage, Alaska, a quiet boy drawn to the volatility of weather and obsessed with snow. Sometimes he sees things before they happen�a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant daughter will drown in a flood as he tries to save her, he comes undone. He travels thousands of miles, fleeing family, home, and the future itself, to deny the dream. On a Caribbean island, destitute, alone, and unsure if his child has survived or his wife can forgive him, David is sheltered by a couple with a daughter of their own. Ultimately it is she who will pull him back into the world, to search for the people he left behind. Doerr's characters are full of grief and longing, but also replete with grace. His compassion for human frailty is extraordinarily moving. In luminous prose, he writes about the power and beauty of nature and about the tiny miracles that transform our lives. About Grace is heartbreaking, radiant, and astonishingly accomplished.… (more)

Media reviews

The Spectator

About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold.

— 5 more

The Guardian

Wouldn't it be useful to see the future when making choices about finance, marriage or the job market? But David Winkler, a meteorologist from Alaska, is completely crippled by his prophetic dreams.

New York Times

In his first novel, ''About Grace,'' Anthony Doerr drags his protagonist, David Winkler, over a fair few hot coals: 25 years of exile as a dogsbody in a new hotel in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, a near-drowning experience, malnutrition, a clinically debilitating journey in a clapped-out Datsun

across the vastness of America, an Alaskan winter in an unheated shed, gradual loss of eyesight, an alienated daughter he abandoned when she was a few months old. The comparisons with Lear are flickering and fugitive but inevitable.

Show Less

San Francisco Chronicle

In his intriguing but ultimately disappointing first novel, Anthony Doerr gives us David Winkler, an otherwise ordinary man whose dreams literally come true. When he dreams that a man carrying a hatbox will be struck and killed by a bus at a nearby intersection, it comes to pass just as he

imagined. When he dreams that a woman wearing polyester pants will drop a magazine at the Snow Goose Market, she drops it -- and he falls in love.

Show Less

The Washington Post

David Winkler, the 59-year-old protagonist of Anthony Doerr's debut novel, About Grace, is a dreamer but not, alas, of the carefree, California kind. Instead Winkler is a modern-day Cassandra who dreams about future events -- some momentous, some trivial -- and when he tries to warn people, he

meets, for the most part, with incredulity and skepticism.

Show Less

Entertainment Weekly

Meteorologist David Winkler has the blessing/curse of seeing his most vivid dreams come true, and when slumber reveals that he'll lose his 5-month-old daughter to a flood, every passing minute feels like a cold frisson of terror.