The Truth About Love
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It’s dangerous . . . and that’s the truth about love.
A young man shields his terrible wounds from his mother; a husband believes he can love his grief-stricken wife back to life; a young girl puts her own life on hold until her family can find their way back from blinding pain; a man surrenders to the helplessness of obsessive love.
Set in Ireland, this brilliant, intense story is about a family named O’Hara who chose to remain in the place of their loss, and the stranger from Germany who ran from his. It’s about love—for another, for a country, for family—and survival, and it’s remarkable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hart's previous five novels (Damage; Sin) addressed the disturbing power of love, and in her latest, she returns to the topic with mixed success. Hart opens with the stream-of-consciousness narration of a teenage boy's fatal accident in 1962 Ireland before shifting to the precise, nearly stifling voice of Thomas Middlehoff (aka "The German") at the funeral. Distant and polite, Thomas orbits ever closer to the beleaguered O'Hara family: the boy's father, Tom, wants to buy a family heirloom from Thomas; he bumps into Olivia, the boy's sister, with his car (she sustains scrapes and bruises); and the boy's mother, Sissy, exposes her deep grief to him, spurring him into contemplations of his own secrets and horrors. After another Joycean interlude depicting Sissy's treatment in a mental hospital, Olivia takes over the story from the present day, and though outwardly successful, she refuses to let go of her anger at her brother's death. Unfortunately, revelations in the second half of this brief novel feel rushed, while the characters' proclivities for introspection do little to create narrative urgency.
