The Hour I First Believed The Hour I First Believed

The Hour I First Believed

A Novel

    • 4.2 • 331 Ratings
    • $15.99
    • $15.99

Publisher Description

New York Times Bestseller

The profound and compelling story of a personal quest for meaning and faith from Wally Lamb, #1 New York Times bestselling author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

“The beauty of The Hour I First Believed, a soaring novel as amazingly graceful as the classic hymn that provides the title, is that Lamb never loses sight of the spark of human resilience. . . . Lamb’s wonderful novel offers us the promise and power of hope.”
—Miami Herald

When 47-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Connecticut to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm back east. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.

In The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.

 

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2009
October 6
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
768
Pages
PUBLISHER
HarperCollins e-books
SELLER
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
SIZE
2.6
MB

Customer Reviews

Jakep304 ,

Bravo!

Not a light read but well worth it………..

Basset hound mom ,

Wally Lamb does it again

A story of life including the ups and many downs. Could not put it down and was sad to lose "a friend" in Caelum Quirk when I was done with the story. Shows the never ending impacts of one's actions, specifically in this case, school violence. Great read, would recommend it for sure.

Freckles0309 ,

So so boring

So much of this book is so mundane. Lamb’s premise of the aftermath of a school shooting, and its effects on survivors, is a good one. But Lamb goes completely overboard with the childhood of his main character.

And... someone should let Lamb know that people don’t constantly speak in questions, when they are not asking questions.

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