First published 1984
Amanda has money, time, and restlessness. She walks away from her marriage in New Orleans and settles in the Arkansas hills, where she spends her days translating the verses of an forgotten French poet from the 1700s. The woman whose words she renders into English lived a scandalous life that ended in prison and death by her own hand. Amanda thinks she has found peace in this quiet work until a student catches her attention. What begins as casual attraction grows into something that consumes her thoughts and reshapes her days. Then Amanda learns she carries a child, just as the poet once did centuries before. Two women separated by time face similar choices about love, motherhood, and the price of passion. Both stories move toward endings that will test everything they believed about themselves.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, second-chance
Setting: Arkansas, France, New Orleans
Period: 1700s, 21st Century
353 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber