The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly - Softcover

Hrbek, Greg

3.76

55 ratings by Goodreads

9780380805433: The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038080543X ISBN 13: 9780380805433

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In the summer of 1975, Thomas Markham is a slight boy of ten, Lindsey Paris a troubled girl of eighteen. When Tom's mother dies in childbirth, his family is shattered and he surrenders to the warm embrace of college-bound Lindsey, who is all too familiar with pain and lonliness. What they share in the darkness of that tragic summer binds them together and haunts them far into the future.

Fifteen years later, in San Francisco, Tom and Lindsey discover their feelings are stronger than ever--and they commence an affair charged with guilt and eroticism. Lindsey's husband, Philip, harbors growing suspicions, while her lesbian ex-lover, Nile, creates a new triangle of sensual deception. With the arrival of Matthew, Tom's runaway brother, tangled histories of silence and lies begin to unravel. As the group attempts to make sense of love and suffering, Thomas moves closer to the troubling questions of his childhood and the meaning of his own identity.

In vivid and lyrical prose, award-winning novelist Greg Hrbek makes an astonishing debut with this journey into the heart and soul of romantic need--its beauties, punishments and unexpected redemptions.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Greg Hrbek is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, and the 1996 James Jones First Novel Award for The Hindenberg Crashes Nightly. He has taught at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and currently lives in northern California.

From Publishers Weekly:

With sensuous prose and vital characters, this first novel by James Jones Award--winner Hrbek fearlessly explores the wracking entanglements of two lovers in flux. Tom Markham meets Lindsey Paris in Connecticut in 1974, when he is seven and she 15. The deep bond they form includes their shared loss of innocence and the secrets of a criminal act: Tom's mother dies giving birth to his brother, and Lindsey is raped by Tom's cousin. Years later, when they meet again in California, Lindsey is a famous journalist about to marry nature photographer Phil Davenport, whose renown equals hers. A promising tele-animator, Tom has always loved Lindsey, and his passion for her forces him to examine the darker secrets of their shared youth as they embark on a painful affair. Unaware of his wife's past, Phil unwittingly encourages the lovers' "friendship," and, in an attempt to improve Tom's love life, introduces him to Nile Treadway, a glamourous, black ex-lover of Lindsey's. Bisexual Nile embroils herself in their lives, and it seems that both Tom and Lindsey are fated to bring pain to each other. The levels of betrayal and emotional torture escalate for everyone. Hrbek's meditation on love and suffering twists along exquisitely: Phil exempts himself from feeling jealous, considering Tom a "brother" to Lindsey and Nile a "tepid" experiment; Lindsey is frazzled and distraught, ricocheting back and forth between Nile and Tom. Exclusive focus on the turbulent quadrangle is fractured when Tom's 16-year-old brother, a runaway, arrives with his own formidable chaos. Though the writing sometimes leans toward the precious, particularly in moments of Tom's introspection, Hrbek builds scenes with a tight economy of timing and detail, so that a tension resonates well beyond their conclusion. In the end the characters find equilibrium, and mellow into a hard-earned serenity Hrbek's portrait of the heart is magnetic, difficult, strange andAdespite a disquieting endingAwell worth the read. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.