About Grace: A Novel - Hardcover

Doerr, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743261828 ISBN 13: 9780743261821

Publisher: Scribner, 2004

Synopsis

Possessing an unsettling ability to predict random future events, Anchorage resident David Winkler foresees his infant daughter's drowning death and travels thousands of miles to Ohio and the Caribbean to prevent the tragedy, learning about human frailty and the importance of everyday miracles along the way. By the author of The Shell Collector. A first novel. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Anthony Doerr is the author of a collection of short stories, The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and a memoir titled Four Seasons in Rome.  His books have been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, a "Book of the Year" in the Washington Post, and he has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and shared the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.  His book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Der Spiegel, and he writes the “On Science” column for the Boston Globe.  Doerr is the Writer-in-Residence for the state of Idaho.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

He made his way through the concourse and stopped by a window to watch a man with two orange wands wave a jet into its gate. Above the tarmac the sky was faultless, that relentless tropic blue he had never quite gotten used to. At the horizon, clouds had piled up: cumulus congestus, a sign of some disturbance traveling along out there, over the sea.

The slim frame of a metal detector awaited its line of tourists. In the lounge: duty-free rum, birds of paradise sleeved in cellophane, necklaces made from shells. From his shirt pocket he produced a notepad and a pen.

The human brain, he wrote, is seventy-five percent water. Our cells are little more than sacs in which to carry water. When we die it spills from us into the ground and air and into the stomachs of animals and is contained again in something else. The properties of liquid water are this: it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic; it is perpetually in motion. These are the tenets of hydrology; these are the things one should know if one is to know oneself.

He passed through the gate. On the boarding stairs, almost to the jet, a feeling like choking rose in his throat. He clenched his duffel and clung to the rail. A line of birds -- ground doves, perhaps -- were landing one by one in a patch of mown grass on the far side of the runway. The passengers behind him shifted restlessly. A flight attendant wrung her hands, reached for him, and escorted him into the cabin.

The sensation of the plane accelerating and rising was like entering a vivid and perilous dream. He braced his forehead against the window. The ocean widened below the wing; the horizon tilted, then plunged. The plane banked and the island reemerged, lush and sudden, fringed by reef. For an instant, in the crater of Soufrière, he could see a pearly green sheet of water. Then the clouds closed, and the island was gone.

The woman in the seat next to him had produced a novel and was beginning to read. The airplane climbed the troposphere. Tiny fronds of frost were growing on the inner pane of the window. Behind them the sky was dazzling and cold. He blinked and wiped his glasses with his sleeve. They were climbing into the sun.

Copyright © 2004 by Anthony Doerr

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743261828
• ISBN 13: 9780743261821
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416