Cloud Nine
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
A deeply moving and resonant novel about the power of love and family feeling in the face of suffering and change.
A beloved only child, Sarah was brought up on a wild island, where the people were as one with the landscape and where her father, George, farmed geese. After her mother died of cancer, he brought her up alone, but their lives were further twisted by trouble after Sarah was jilted by Zeke, an island boy, who left her pregnant and devastated. Shortly afterwards, Zeke was killed in a car crash, and Sarah fled the island for a new life on the mainland, leaving her father feeling rejected and angry.
Now, fourteen years later, Sarah, making a living through her quilting business called Cloud Nine, is herself recovering from cancer. The illness threatened more than her life – the trauma brought to a head her difficult relationship with her son, Mike, who finally left her to go and live with his grandfather.
It is at this point that their lives elide with another tragic family. Will Burke, the pilot she charters to visit Mike, has never recovered from the death of his own teenage son, which wrecked his marriage and has left his daughter Susan like a piece of flotsam drifting between Will, her mother and her mother’s ghastly new husband. In the tense, emotive story that unfolds, all their lives are changed as love, hope and endurance eventually find a way to transcend suffering.
Reviews
‘Luanne Rice touches the deepest, most tender corners of the heart’
Tami Hoag
‘Exciting, emotional, terrific’
New York Times Book Review
‘Rice has an elegant style, a sharp eye and a real warmth’
San Francisco Chronicle
About the author
Luanne Rice is the author of Secrets of Paris, Stone Heart, Angels All Over Town, Blue Moon, Home Fires, and Crazy in Love, which was made into a TV movie. Originally from Connecticut, she now lives in New York with her husband.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers sympathetic to Rice's (Blue Moon) highly sentimental take on the eternal power of love and family will enjoy this skillfully wrought tale of courage on the part of a single mother recovering from a brain tumor. Sarah Talbot, who has built a down-bedding mail-order business ("Cloud Nine") based on the products of her father's farm in Maine, finds new joy in life's simple pleasures, such as celebrating the 37th birthday she thought she'd never see. Her delight proves infectious to others in her small upstate New York community. They include Susan Burke, also known as Secret or Snow, a troubled teenager from a broken home who is still grieving over the accidental death of her brother; and Susan's father, pilot Will Burke, who is trying to cope with his failed marriage and his inability to save his son. In quiet, unassuming prose, Rice fashions a tightly paced story that is hard to put down, delicately constructing the blossoming relationship between Sarah and Will. At the same time, she effectively depicts the impact a loving person can have on an adolescent simply longing for a real connection with a caring adult. The Talbot family's island home, where Sarah's recalcitrant father and her estranged teenage son live together in a complex relationship, is idealized as a healing environment for the Burkes. The plot veers into melodrama at the end, when love and death meet in a heartbreaking scene, but Rice's message remains a powerful one: the strength of precious family ties can ultimately set things right. Author tour.
