Abide with Me
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4.1 • 39 Ratings
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- £0.99
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- £0.99
Publisher Description
From the Man Booker Prize Longlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton
Katherine is only five-years-old. Struck dumb with grief at her mother's death, it is down to her father, the heartbroken minister Tyler Caskey, to bring his daughter out of silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy.
But Tyler Caskey is barely surviving himself. His cold, church-assigned home is colder still since Lauren's death, and he struggles to find the right words for his sermons; struggles to be a leader to his congregation when he himself is lost.
When Katherine's schoolteacher calls to discuss his daughter's anti-social behaviour, it sparks a chain of events that begins to tear down Tyler's defences. The small-town rumour-mill has much to make of Katherine's odd behaviour, and even more to say about Tyler's relationship with his housekeeper, Connie Hatch. And in Tyler's darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation's humanity - and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all.
From the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Amy & Isabelle, this is a startlingly beautiful novel about love and abandonment, faith and hypocrisy; and the peril of family secrets…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Strout's satisfying follow-up to her 1999 debut, Amy and Isabel, follows a recent widower from grief through breakdown to recovery in 1959 smalltown Maine. The father of two young girls and the newly appointed minister of the fictional town of West Annett, Tyler Caskey is quietly devastated by wife Lauren's death following a prolonged illness. Tyler's older daughter Katherine is deeply antisocial at school and at home; his adorable younger daughter Jeannie has been sent to live upstate with Tyler's overbearing mother. Talk begins to spread of Katherine's increasing unsoundness and of Tyler's possible affair with his devoted-though-suspicious housekeeper, Connie Hatch. It's spearheaded by the gossipy Ladies' Aide Society, whose members bear down on Tyler like the dark clouds of a gathering storm. Meanwhile, Tyler's grief shades into an angry, cynical depression, leaving him unable to parent his troubled daughter or minister to his congregation, and putting his job and family at risk. Strout's deadpan, melancholy prose powerfully conveys Tyler's sense of internal confinement. The uplifting ending arrives too easily, but on the whole, Strout has crafted a harrowing meditation of exile on Main Street.
