Signal Fires
A novel
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • From the beloved author of Inheritance: "a haunting, moving, and propulsive exploration of family secrets” (Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings)
Two families. One night. A constellation of lives changed forever.
A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year
An ancient majestic oak stands beneath the stars on Division Street. And under the tree sits Ben Wilf, a retired doctor, and ten-year-old Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant, lonely boy who is pointing out his favorite constellations. Waldo doesn’t realize it but he and Ben have met before. And they will again, and again. Across time and space, and shared destiny.
Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret—one which will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own.. Spanning fifty kaleidoscopic years, on a street—and in a galaxy—where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined.
Urgent and compassionate, Signal Fires is a magical story for our times, a literary tour de force by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers. A luminous meditation on family, memory, and the healing power of interconnectedness.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A tragic accident haunts two families in this deeply moving drama by Dani Shapiro, the author of wonderful memoirs like Inheritance and Hourglass. After a fatal car accident in the mid-’80s, teen siblings Theo and Sarah keep a huge secret that, decades later, brings repercussions not just for themselves but for a neighbour family who didn’t even live nearby at the time. With loving attention to detail, Shapiro explores the emotional damage brought on by repression and trauma. Her damaged characters feel frustratingly real, but she never robs us of the hope that healing and redemption are possible. Signal Fires is a poignant family saga about the deep pain of bad decisions and the power of love and acceptance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shapiro returns after the memoir Inheritance with a beautiful exploration of the connections between two families and the reverberations from a teenager's lie. In 1985 Avalon, N.Y., 15-year-old Theo Wilf drives his 17-year-old sister Sarah and her friend Misty home after a night of partying. After he accidentally drops the car lighter down his shirt, he crashes the car into the tree in front of their house. Ben, Theo and Sarah's surgeon father, rushes to save Misty's life, but fails, and in an impulsive decision, Sarah tells Ben that she was driving. Then, in 1999, shortly after the Shenkman family moves in across the street, Ben helps deliver their infant, Waldo, during an emergency birth. Shapiro continues to jump around in time, unspooling the consequences of these two fateful nights "like so many wobbly tops set spinning." As Theo becomes a chef and Sarah a screenwriter, both wrestle with their guilt, while Ben, who never really gets to know the Shenkmans, is left alone to deal with his wife's dementia and develops a bond with Waldo in 2010. Shapiro imagines in luminous prose how each of the characters' lives might have gone if things had turned out differently. It's an intriguing meditation.
