Ever After
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- €1.49
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- €1.49
Publisher Description
William Wharton turns his microscopic gaze on his own life to narrate and scrutinize the untimely deaths of his daughter and her family. A moving story of one man’s rage against death, and spiritual renewal.
On August 3rd 1988, field burning caused a 23-car pile-up that claimed the lives of seven people, including William Wharton’s daughter, Kate, her husband, and their two children. In EVER AFTER, William Wharton searches for meaning in this tragedy, and tries to put a stop to a dangerous agriculture practice.
Written from the perspective of both father and daughter, EVER AFTER is inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measures.
Reviews
‘William Wharton’s search for meaning in personal tragedy is harrowing, courageous, and extraordinarily moving’ – Hilma Wolitzer
‘Wharton’s book has the ring of emotional truth even as it reads like a grippingly dramatic novel’ – Publishers Weekly
About the author
William Wharton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1925. During the Second World War, Wharton served in the US army, until an injury led to his discharge. In 1978, Wharton’s first novel, ‘Birdy’, was published to critical acclaim. Before his death in 2008, Wharton penned 8 further novels, and 3 memoirs. The most recent memoir, ‘Shrapnel’, was published for the first time in English in 2012.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wharton is an award-winning novelist (Birdie; Dad; A Midnight Clear) who six years ago lost his daughter, her husband and their two babies in a multi-car highway crash in Oregon caused by smoke from nearby ``field burning'' that blinded the drivers. In this account, based on his knowledge of the accident and his involvement in the years of legal shenanigans that followed, Wharton writes what is in effect a documentary novel, bringing it all to harrowing life with the skills of a born storyteller. In the first chapters, he writes as daughter Kate, evoking her wandering life, her unhappy first marriage, her meeting in Germany with big, cheerful Bert from Oregon, their homecoming to his native state and the moments right up to the crash. As Will, her father, he recounts his family's vast sorrow--and there are few more wrenching accounts of grief in literature--and his determination, buoyed by a dream of the dead family, to seek redress for their deaths. Hiring an Oregon law firm, he soon runs into a wall of resistance: the field burning is seen as an economic right of the state's grass growers, despite strong local opposition, and soon the lawsuits begin to fly back and forth. Frustrated in his efforts to win a jury trial, surrounded by lawyers and friends who see cash as fair payment for life, Wharton retreats to an elegiac but wonderfully poetic conclusion. His book has the ring of emotional truth even as it reads like a grippingly dramatic novel, and its blend of sorrow and a healing anger has a bracingly cathartic effect. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
