Shadow of Ashland
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Letters in the mail from his long-dead brother send Leo Nolan on a time-bending journey in this “deceptive novel . . . filled with extraordinary events” (The New York Times).
Things have to be settled, or they never go away.
Only weeks before she dies in March, 1984, Leo Nolan’s mother shows her son a rose she says was just given to her by her brother, Jack, who disappeared 50 years earlier. After her death, letters from Jack begin to arrive at the family home. They are postmarked 1934. The final one is from Ashland, Kentucky.
Leo heads to Ashland, to track down the source of the letters…. And to find out why they are arriving now, after 50 years.
Time shifts. Time runs underground, then surfaces. It is 1934, and Leo experiences the Great Depression and the ghosts of the past as no one has in 50 years, in Ashland, where dreams die and are born again.
“A love story, time travel epic, ghost story, labor history, road novel and a bank heist, all with the added touch of Steinbeckian metaphysics. For me it was the surprise of the year, a rich evocation of 1934 small-town Kentucky that winds up completely unpredictable.” –The Edmonton Journal, “Top Fiction Pick of the Year”
“Green has devised a truly mysterious mystery, he writes with a real and rare sympathy for his characters.” –The Atlanta Constitution
“A jewel of a novel” –Booklist
WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This poignant if murky parable about love-old and new, lost and found-from a Canadian SF writer (Barking Dogs, 1988) is wonderfully imagined and poetically told. Days before she dies in March 1984, Leo Nolan's mother shows her son a rose that she claims was just given to her by her brother Jack, who vanished 50 years ago. After her death, letters from Jack, postmarked 1934, begin to arrive at her house, inspiring Leo to leave Toronto in order to retrace the letters' trail, which leads to Ashland, Ky. There, Leo visits Jack's last known address, an anachronistic rooming house still operated after half a century by the same proprietors. In Ashland, the seeker finds love, through an affair with an unmarried mother with a young son, and also magic as he is transported across time to relive the last seven days of Jack's life. Leo then returns to Canada, where he experiences not only a deepening of his life's mysteries but also an epiphany involving his failed marriage and stillborn son. With Leo's narration as evocative as the pages of a newly discovered family album, this proves a remarkably affecting literary work that the publisher rightly compares to Jack Finney's Time and Again.
