Close Your Eyes
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- €7.49
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- €7.49
Publisher Description
A page-turning, beautifully written novel from the critically-acclaimed author of Forgive Me, How to be Lost and Sleep Toward Heaven.
My father smelled like cigarettes and cardamom. When I was small, and wanted comfort, he would put down the wooden spoon when he was cooking, or the pen when he was writing. Always, he would halt what he was doing and crouch down. I pressed my cheek to his warm chest. In his arms, I was safe.
The savage murder of eight-year-old Lauren's mother, and the sentencing of her father Izaan to life imprisonment for the murder, tears her world apart. As an adult, she can't understand why she has panic attacks, is unable to accept her boyfriend's marriage proposal, or listen to her brother Alex attempt to convince her of their father's innocence and wrongful imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Sylvia Hall is running away from her loser boyfriend, determined to keep the baby he doesn't want. She knows her best friend since childhood, Victoria, will help her – but Victoria has her own problems that threaten to consume her.
All three women are connected by tragedy and betrayal: Close Your Eyes is a heart-breaking page-turner about what happens when a family is destroyed.
About the author
Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City, and graduated from Williams College and the University of Montana. Her short stories have been published in various literary reviews and magazines. She is the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel ‘Sleep Towards Heaven’ and ‘How to be Lost’, and was named by the New York Post as one of five Writers to Watch in 2003. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, geologist Tip Meckel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A nearly transparent whodunit provides a less than ideal structure for an otherwise incisive story of loss and redemption. Lauren Mahdian has no interest in uncovering the details of her mother's murder 24 years ago, but her brother, Alex, is obsessed with exonerating their father, who has been convicted of the murder, and whom Lauren has cut out of her life. But when Alex, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, is feared dead after his hospital is bombed, Lauren feels compelled to carry on his investigation, disinterring memories of a night she'd long ago repressed, suffering panic attacks, and recoiling from her sweet if bumbling boyfriend. Elsewhere, Sylvia Hall is pregnant, with few prospects, and planning on getting help from her glamorous childhood friend, Victoria, with whom she shares a dark secret from many years ago that just may hold the key to Lauren's mother's death. Ward (Love Stories in This Town) excels at capturing vivid moments of warmth and kindness even amid a staggering accumulation of personal losses, and while the mystery plot is weak, the rest of the novel is marked by a bruised but generous spirit.
