Almost Heaven - by Marianne Wiggins (Paperback)

About the Book

A foreign correspondent sets out to help his mentor's sister reconstruct her past after she is hospitalized with hysterical amnesia, and almost at once the two begin a passionate love affair.

Book Synopsis

With this breakneck story of love and loss, the award-winning author of Evidence of Things Unseen and Properties of Thirst, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is a series of powerful metaphors for the curative forces of love as well as her own personal love letter to the American South.

Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes the familiar sunshine and rolling hills of Virginia will help him put aside the horrors he reported. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor's sister, who is institutionalized with a mysterious amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature. Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair--one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget.

Review Quotes

The Washington Post Book World Wiggins unabashedly tackles the biggest themes: the vicious randomness of "acts of God" and our attempts to grapple with them; the individual's understanding of itself and the role of memory in that construction; and the endless repetitions of history and tragedy.

Booklist Wiggins is one of those critically acclaimed authors whose books acquire passionate followings...[like] other southern writers who find passion to be a source of both salvation and gothic nightmare.

Library Journal A real tour de force on the immensity of human loss.

Library Journal Wiggins writes stunningly polished prose that is both quirky and urgent, letting slip clues to both Holden's and Melanie's situations as the plot builds with a roar to the final blowout.

Men's Journal A strange and savage little masterpiece.

Men's Journal She writes with the staccato authority of an Uzi.... She wastes no words, thrusting scene upon scene into your face.

The New York Times Book Review Wiggins is a writer of substantial gifts....Passion develops through hidden chains of causality, so we never know exactly where or when it's going to strike....Almost Heaven bristles with meteorological imagery -- from heat waves to hailstorms to torrential rain -- all of it related to the emotional lives of her characters.

The Washington Post Book World Marianne Wiggins dares to make fictions that stand in the face of heart-cracking circumstance, fictions that, in fact, resound with hearts shattering.

About the Author

Marianne Wiggins is the author of eight novels, including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She has won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Heidinger Kafka Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in Venice, California.