Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, is back in top form with a richly textured novel about a tragic accident and its effects on two generations of a family.
When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own.
Narrated by Aaron's son, Mac, When Madeline Was Young chronicles the Maciver family through the decades, from Mac’s childhood growing up with Madeline and his cousin Buddy in Wisconsin through the Vietnam War, through Mac’s years as a husband with children of his own, and through Buddy’s involvement with the subsequent Gulf Wars. Jane Hamilton, with her usual humor and keen observations of human relationships, deftly explores the Maciver's unusual situation and examines notions of childhood (through Mac and Buddy’s actual youth as well as Madeline’s infantilization) and a rivalry between Buddy’s and Mac’s families that spans decades and various wars. She captures the pleasures and frustrations of marriage and family, and she exposes the role that past relationships, rivalries, and regrets inevitably play in the lives of adults.
Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest and exquisite portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes and alters the boundaries of love.
Orange Prize shortlisted author of The Short History of a Prince and A Map of the World Jane Hamilton is the chronicler of family relationships; the cartographer of the human heart Observer To Mac, despite her mature body, his tall sister Madeline never looked any different to other children. Until one summer evening when his cousin Buddy taunted him with the odd truth of their family: Madeline was not really Mac s sister, but his father s first wife. A terrible accident had left her brain-damaged, with the intellect of a seven-year-old. When his father remarried, she became part of his new family, devotedly cared for by his second wife like one of their own. It is the impact of Madeline s tragedy on the family for several decades, and how it shapes and alters forever the boundaries of love, that drives this moving story told with Jane Hamilton s irresistible humour and keen insight. A vital and absorbing human drama…her most distinguished work so far Washington Post Hamilton affirms her status as one of our most magnetic and provocative novelists Chicago Tribune
