The Worst Thing I've Done
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Stones from the River comes an intimate and dangerous story of three friends that goad one another into crossing a line that brings them shocking consequences.
Since early childhood, Annie, Jake, and Mason have had a special bond. When Annie's parents die on the same night that she and Mason are married, the three friends decide to raise Annie's newborn sister, Opal, together.
Annie struggles to be both a sister and a mother to Opal, a wife to Mason, and a friend to Jake. Not surprisingly, their relationships, already entangled, grow dangerous, too close, on the line.
One fateful night the three friends miss the moment when they could still turn back, provoking each other to step across a line that brings shocking, unforeseen consequences.
Once again, Ursula Hegi writes along that border where bliss and sorrow meet. Sensuous, funny, and mysterious, The Worst Thing I've Done takes us into an exuberant and troubled friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The troubles specific to triangular relationships are explored with depth and substance in Hegi's complex and affecting latest. Annie, Jake and Mason friends practically from the womb have developed a fraught dynamic sharply affected by competitiveness, attraction and jealousy. The book's opening trauma Mason's suicide serves as a springboard for Hegi to delve into the friends' tangled past: Mason and Annie get married the same night Annie's father and very pregnant mother die in a car wreck. The baby, Opal, survives, and the three friends raise her. But festering attractions Mason to Jake; Jake to Annie lead Mason to cross a line, Annie to want out of the marriage and Jake to fail to act at a pivotal moment. Woven into the mix is the post-WWII story of Annie's immigrant mother, Lotte, and her friend Mechthild, who came to America from Germany to work as au pairs and pretended to be Dutch to avoid persecution. Though a bumper crop of tragedy weighs heavily on this controlled and articulate novel, Hegi (Sacred Time) is an accomplished storyteller; she inhabits different characters and blends the past with the present to tell a rich story of love, death, loyalty and survival.
