The Weight of Water

by Anita Shreve

Overview

Journeying to Smuttynose Island, off the coast of New Hampshire, to shoot a photo essay about a century-old double murder, a photographer becomes absorbed by the crime and increasingly obsessed with jealousy over the idea that her husband is having an affair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316789974
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/01/1997
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 Years

About the Author

Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, including A Change in Altitude, Testimony; her best-known book, The Pilot’s Wife, which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England’s Orange prize. Her book Resistance was turned into a movie with the same name. She is a writer who combines seemingly effortless prose with riveting storytelling.

Hometown:

New Hampshire; Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

1946

Education:

B.A., Tufts University

Website:

http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/41/239/index.html

Editorial Reviews

In 1873, two women living on the Isles of Shoals, a lonely, windswept group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. A third woman survived, cowering in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, Jean, a magazine photographer working on a photoessay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter, Billie, aboard a boat skippered by her brother-in-law, Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend, Adaline. As Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders, Thomas and Adaline find themselves drawn together-with potentially ruinous consequences. Shreve (Where or When; Resistance) perfectly captures the ubiquitous dampness of life on a sailboat, deftly evoking the way in which the weather comes to dictate all actions for those at sea. With the skill of a master shipbuilder, Shreve carefully fits her two stories together, tacking back and forth between the increasingly twisted murder mystery and the escalating tensions unleashed by the threat of a dangerous shipboard romance. Written with assurance and grace, plangent with foreboding and a taut sense of inexorability, The Weight of Water is a powerfully compelling tale of passion, a provocative and disturbing meditation on the nature of love.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Professional photographer Jean thinks her latest assignment on New England's Isle of Shoals is a good chance to combine work with a family getaway. Her mistake is soon clear. Tensions build among the five passengers on a relative's sailboat as she begins to question her husband's relationship with a beautiful young woman. While researching the 1873 double murder of two Norwegian immigrants, Jean discovers a heretofore unknown diary kept by Maren Hontvedt, lone survivor of the mayhem. In separate chapters Maren passionately recounts the grisly events, while Jean finds a peculiar resonance between Maren's situation and her own, leading inexorably to a terrible denouement. Shreve (Resistance, LJ 5/15/95) moves the action along deftly, and if plot details sometimes veer perilously close to soap opera, the level of writing is far above the typical best-seller treatment of similar themes. A good choice for libraries where fiction readers want historical drama and family suspense. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/96.]Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.

Library Journal