Illumination Night

by Alice Hoffman Narrated by Suzanne Toren

Overview

Beginning on the night of the Grand Illumination, a festival of lanterns held each summer on Martha's Vineyard, this novel is a modern chronicle of a marriage and a bittersweet exploration of an extraordinary passion. Illumination Night follows the lives of a young blond giant who is as beautiful as he is frightening; an old woman at the end of her life whose last mission is to save her granddaughter's soul; a family torn apart by a wife's fears and a husband's unrealized desires; and the high school girl who comes to Martha's Vineyard against her will, who steals husbands and cars, and who will bring everyone together in a web of yearning, sin, and ultimate redemption. Both riveting and reflective, this is a story that brings to light the talent that has made Alice Hoffman an acclaimed bestselling author.

Editorial Reviews

Gwyneth Cravens

Subtle touches here and there make this intelligent novel shine. Ms. Hoffman knows how to tell a story in clear language and how to avoid subordinating the meanderings of temperament to logic or plot.
— New York Times

Cleveland Plain Dealer

One of the best writers we have today-insightful, funny, intelligent, with a distinctive voice.

From the Publisher

Praise for Illumination Night

“Daringly mixing comedy with tragedy...[Hoffman] has created a narrative that somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage…Her characters are branded onto one’s memory.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Vivid, convincing characters...uncommon insight.”—People

“[A] bright constellation of characters...draws the reader into the dusky, dreamy world of Alice Hoffman.”—St. Petersburg Times

“Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things.”—Amy Tan

“Not-so-delicate questions are raised in a wonderfully delicate way in Alice Hoffman’s latest novel...Explorations of the tangled strands of parenthood and friendship, self-protection and generosity, dream and disillusionment are made achingly vivid by Hoffman’s ability to ground them in the finely etched details of her characters’ daily lives.”—Newsday

“There is a cumulative power to Illumination Night that is wondrous...It’s enough to make one search out other books by Alice Hoffman.”—The Chicago Tribune

“Reading an authentic prose stylist of high order is an uncommon privilege.”—The Boston Globe

NY) Newsday (Long Island

Explorations of the tangled strands of parenthood and friendship, self-protection and generosity, dream and disillusionment are made achingly vivid by Hoffman’s ability to ground them in the finely etched details of her characters’ daily lives.”

Chicago Tribune

There is a cumulative power to Illumination Night that is wondrous.”

New York Times

Alice Hoffman…has enough power of empathy to make her characters matter to us. Daringly mixing comedy with tragedy, and the quotidian with the fabulous, she has created a narrative that somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage…Ms. Hoffman writes so simply about human passions that her characters are branded onto one’s memory. At their most passionate they hurl themselves down staircases, out of windows, in front of speeding cars. One awakens from the dream of this novel with a memory of trying to catch them. In the light of the story’s afterglow, one keeps on trying to catch them.”

People

By engaging her readers’ empathy so adroitly, Hoffman draws them into exposing themselves to the kind of pain—the pain of commitment—that haunts her story.”

Times (London)

Hoffman hits bulls-eyes on the incomprehension between the young and the old, of the magic and pain of ordinary life. She is erotic and romantic…funny…clever and humane.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169918571
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/01/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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