Shelby Hearon's 14th novel opens at a reception for the loved ones of deceased heart donors where, for the first time, Nan and Douglas Mayhall come face to face with the aging preacher who is the recipient of their twenty-two year old daughter's heart. Their very different reactions to this disturbing encounter sets them off on separate paths.
Something is eroding under the surface of their marriage. Hoping for some peace of mind, Nan goes to Sanibel Island to step back and reassess her life. But it takes another real scare to allow her to slip out of her own footprints for a moment, to see that a world exists outside her pain.
"Stunning...
Footprints is a wonderful novel, rich and full... Her sharp wit is constant."
-- Jill McCorkle in
The Boston Globe"What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage. Chronicler and surgeon, she is compassionate but cool, ironic and intelligent."
-- Sandra Scofield in New York Newsday
"An empathic, incisive evocation of marriage s safe but often claustrophobic bonds..."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"In Footprints Shelby Hearon takes a long, speculative look at the moment in the life of a family when a child departs. She has done a fine job of getting at this inevitable conflict between mother and child, between father and mother. She holds it to the light, turns and examines it with a caustic eye. We are the beneficiaries of a clear-eyed view that catches the humor and poignancy of the evolution of a woman s life."
-- Robb Forman Dew in The New York Times Book Review
"Ms. Hearon s description affects me in the same way that 17th-century Dutch art does, with an evocation of smell and taste and depiction of texture and light that is near perfection... But there is more than description, of course; Ms. Hearon ably illuminates life."
-- Karen Milan in The Dallas Morning News
