by Anne Enright
Snow blankets Terenure, a Dublin suburb, in the winter of 2009. The city stops. A woman sits in the strange quiet, remembering how she fell for a married man she calls the love of her life. She thinks back to hotel rooms where they met, to long afternoons lost in desire and self-deception. The affair consumed her with its sudden intensity and irresistible pull. Now she waits for his twelve-year-old daughter Evie to arrive at her door. The child is fragile, caught between her parents' broken marriage and this new arrangement. As snow continues to fall, making the streets luminous and still, the woman confronts what her choices have cost and what they have brought her. The silent city mirrors her own suspended state between past and present, between the intoxication of forbidden love and the reality of its consequences.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, contemporary, contemporary-romance, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: forbidden-love, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Dublin, Terenure
Period: 2009
Paperback · Paragon