When Madeline Was Young - Softcover

Hamilton, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400096995 ISBN 13: 9781400096992

Publisher: Anchor, 2007

Synopsis

Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World brings us a rich and loving novel about a non-traditional family in the aftermath of a terrible accident.When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers a head injury in a bicycle crash, she is left with the mental capabilities of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own. Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest and exquisite portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes the boundaries of love.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Orange Prize shortlisted author of The Short History of a Prince and A Map of the World Jane Hamilton is the chronicler of family relationships; the cartographer of the human heart Observer To Mac, despite her mature body, his tall sister Madeline never looked any different to other children. Until one summer evening when his cousin Buddy taunted him with the odd truth of their family: Madeline was not really Mac s sister, but his father s first wife. A terrible accident had left her brain-damaged, with the intellect of a seven-year-old. When his father remarried, she became part of his new family, devotedly cared for by his second wife like one of their own. It is the impact of Madeline s tragedy on the family for several decades, and how it shapes and alters forever the boundaries of love, that drives this moving story told with Jane Hamilton s irresistible humour and keen insight. A vital and absorbing human drama…her most distinguished work so far Washington Post Hamilton affirms her status as one of our most magnetic and provocative novelists Chicago Tribune

About the Author:

JANE HAMILTON is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, and A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named one the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, the Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club. Her following work, The Short History of a Prince, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, and her novel Disobedience, was published by Doubleday in 2000. She lives in and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin.Please visit her website: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/janehamilton/

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1400096995
• ISBN 13: 9781400096992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336