Vigil for a Stranger
A Novel
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead. This haunting literary thriller is an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis.
“A chilling, eloquent novel that draws you in with mystery and holds you there with love, obsession, failure, insanity, and an enchanting hybrid of past and present.” —Kirkus Reviews
Kitty Burns Florey is the author of ten novels and two works of nonfiction as well as many essays and short stories. Born in Syracuse, she has lived in Boston, Brooklyn, and New Haven. She now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Florey, sets this, her sixth novel, inside the mind of Christine Ward, a contemporary painter who lives with an eccentric pizza-maker named James in New Haven, Conn. Christine, finally living a calm, happy, albeit superficial, life after years of mental instability, travels to Manhattan one day to have lunch with her French ex-mother-in-law and to meet a gallery owner. The day changes her life: snooping in a fellow train traveler's Filofax, she sees the very uncommon name of her dead best friend, a hipped-out, left-wing charmer she knew at Oberlin. She begins an odyssey to discover if he is in fact dead, a search that quickly becomes an exploration of her sanity, and the depths of her unhappiness. Florey writes with straightforward simplicity, and readers will quickly find themselves not only laughing with Christine at her own absurdity, but feeling her bleak, chronic pain. Soon obsessed with not only her friend's death, but her brother's, she succumbs to the instability that deprived her of her only child. Through almost the entire book, Florey manages to balance the ambiguity of events with Christine's clarity in the face of them. If the rather tentative ending falters, it still does not lessen Florey's achievement.
