Evensong by Gail Godwin

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Gail Godwin
• Title: Evensong
• Publisher: ‎ Ballantine Books; First Edition (March 22, 1999)
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover w/Deckle Edge – 405 pages‏
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0345372441
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0345372444
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.65 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Edition: First Edition

 

Synopsis:

To read Gail Godwin is to touch the very core of human experience. With inimitable grace and aching emotional precision, this New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award nominee probes our own complexities in characters whose lives oscillate between success and struggle, stoic resolve and quixotic temptation, bitter disappointment and small, sacred joy. Now, in her first novel since The Good Husband, Godwin again translates our everyday existence into soul-touching truths as she brings to brilliantly realized life the people of a small Smoky Mountain town–and a woman whose world is indelibly altered by them.

 

At the advent of the new millennium, the residents of High Balsam are in desperate need of hope. Economic and social unrest has led to tragedy. For Margaret Bonner, the young pastor of High Balsam’s Episcopal church, care of the community is her constant challenge and devotion.

 

But now, into Margaret’s well-ordered life, come three strangers–a firebrand female evangelist with a haunted past; an elderly, itinerant man whose visit to this quiet hamlet may be no accident; and a troubled boy who Margaret’s husband, headmaster of a progressive, local school, is determined to save. Soon these explosive personalities will ignite a conflagration in Margaret’s marriage and in the depths of her very soul.

 

Raising profound issues of love, commitment, and the ever-changing landscape of family, Evensong is both graceful and gripping in its story of a marriage struggling to sustain the best of itself in a volatile world. With this engrossing new novel, one of our most gifted and accomplished storytellers gives us an unforgettable portrait of an American town at the century’s end–and of the unexpected events that forever shape our lives.

 

About the Author:

Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including Unfinished Desires, A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, and Evenings at Five.

 

She is also the author of The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, the first of two volumes, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer.

 

She lives in Woodstock, New York.