About Grace

"To say this book is beautiful, extraordinary or moving is futile. In comparison with Anthony Doerr's word-perfect prose, any description of his first novel seems trite. Just buy About Grace, call in sick, switch off the phone and see for yourself how good contemporary fiction can be."

Elena Seymenliyska, The Guardian

My second book is a novel entitled About Grace. Scroll down to read some embarrasing praise of it, and here's a link to a nice summary of the narrative in the Washington Post. Very briefly, the protagonist, David Winkler, sometimes sees things before they happen—a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; he will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. Early in the book Winkler dreams that his infant daughter--Grace--will drown in a flood as he tries to save her. As his neighborhood and house begin to flood, Winkler finds himself forced to flee everything he knows. I wrote the book with the hope the story might pose questions about the nature of family, time, grace, and the intersection of the human and natural worlds.

About Grace was a Book Sense76 selection, a Washington Post Bookworld Book of the Year, a main pick for the Daily Mail book club in London, a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award, the Book of-the-Month Club picked it as one of the five best books of 2004, and it topped the Seattle-Post Intelligencer's best of 2004 list. You can read a few chapters here, learn more about snow crystals here, and purchase the novel at any of the links below. Thank you for your interest.

 

 

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Some praise for the novel:

"It is told with lyricism and a wealth of natural and quotidian detail that interweaves to make people and their surroundings - whether Alaska at 20 below zero or a small blue house on a small hot island - thoroughly enmeshed and symbiotic."

Nancy Connors, The Plain Dealer

 

Doerr traverses again the territory he had marked out in the stories of his lucent first book, the short-story collection 'The Shell Collector (2002): a rapture with nature expressed in prose that sings off the page; an infinitely subtle algebra of resonance and sympathy between minds, lives, objects, light, senses, weather; the majestic indifference of nature; the proper measure of man against natural forces. Doerr has a compulsion for observation and a passion for nature that borders on the religious.

Neel Mukherjee, The New York Times

 

 

"I loved this wonderful book--its strangeness, its obsessiveness, its beautiful sentences.

Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane


"As I turned the pages of About Grace, I realized how fully I had come to believe in [Winkler], how much I wanted him to reconnect with Sandy and Grace; I felt myself, like Winkler in his dreams, in the presence of an experience. As I neared the end, I read more and more slowly, increasingly reluctant to leave him and his intricately imagined world behind.

Margot Livesey, Washington Post

"About Grace is a stunning meditation on chance and pattern, exile and home. Gorgeous, transporting, and deeply, deeply satisfying. Equal parts science and magic, (but all of it magical.)"

Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

"This mesmerizing debut novel is a pitch-perfect examination of love and regret by a much-honored young literary writer now living in Boise, Idaho. Doerr tracks the unlikely life of a scientific everyman in Alaska, who is haunted by frightening premonitions that come true. When he dreams that his infant daughter dies in a flood, David Winkler flees his wife and child and takes refuge on a Caribbean Island, where he subsists for two decades, unsure of their fate. His return to the United States, in hopes of reconnection and reconciliation, produces a startling odyssey that grips the heart in a tightening vise. An utterly unforgettable novel."

John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"I hesitate to say this book will take your breath away because it's such
a cliche; but really I promise you it will. Doerr writes with elegiac beauty
about human fraility and the power of Nature, weaving complex metaphors into
a literary carpet of dazzling numinosity. ...I can't remember when a novel so
entranced me.The only criticism I can muster is that About Grace is almost inhumanly faultless."

Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

Some more:

"Doerr has crafted an immensely compelling story, one I'd be inclined to call a page-turner if his prose weren't so arresting... And he's able to discourse fluidly on scientific issues important to Winkler's character in a way that not only avoids bogging down the narrative, but positively enriches it. Same goes for the more ponderous passages that deal with Nietzschean notions of eternal recurrence or rifts in space/time more commonly encountered in Stephen Hawking's work than that of a novelist.


"About Grace" is a rare novel that succeeds at being smart without pretensions; that revels in symbolism with being heavy handed; that uplifts with being sentimental."

Shawn A. Miller, The Daily Republic

"The attention to detail is fine; like the images seen through the microscope Winkler uses to examine snowflakes, Doerr's descriptions reveal marvels that normally go unnoticed. Through the lens of his prose Anthony Doerr captures both the destructive and inspirational qualities of nature: the chorus of crackling ice on a river; snow falling like stars; skies of hallucinatory colours. About Grace is a remarkable novel."

Daniel Starza-Smith, Times Literary Supplement

"Gradually [Winkler] comes to realise that the connections and permutations in his own life are not fixed but — like snowflakes — full of infinite possibility and beauty. He may see the future, but his actions can change it. This discovery is Winkler’s “grace” and lends a delightfully hopeful ending to this intensely poetic first novel."

Lucy Atkins, London Times

"His characters are unique and authentically human and these aspects make the novel a treasure. The delicate nature of the human heart shines in each of them. Like the arms of snowflakes he so often describes, the main character is breakable, but somehow endures the harsh surroundings to come out whole. "About Grace" celebrates the blessings all around us, whether it's the miracle of forgiveness by our loved ones, or the miracle of nature all around us."

Renee Warner, Denver Post

"About Grace is a taut, gorgeously written odyssey of heartbreak and self-forgiveness. It is indeed about grace--what happens when we have found it yet manage to lose it--and about so much more: the power of love, the power of grief, and above all the power of dreams."

Julia Glass, author of Three Junes

"... there is something of Snow Falling on Cedars in this novel's method of revealing through flashbacks and in the authors' shared devotion to nature and its power both for destruction and healing. For as its title indicates, with "grace" uncapitalized, about grace is a novel about a man searching for salvation and finding it in the small unexpected kindnesses of ordinary people as well as in the grandeur of the natural world."

Mary J. Elkins, Rocky Mountain News

"Anthony Doerr's first novel, About Grace, actually seems to be about a lot of things. Science. Love. Loss. Wonder. Taking chances and missing them.
But it is, as its title suggests, primarily about those moments in our life when something infuses our souls and nudges us into a broader understanding of the world.
These are the times we are given gifts that we don't necessarily understand, don't always deserve and frequently don't want.
These are the fibers of myth, mystery and faith. These are moments of grace."

Mary Ethridge, Akron Beacon Journal

"Readers who delve deeper will find... a study on how human nature can replicate not only a part of itself, but sometimes the same mistakes again and again. And how there is need in each of us to break that pattern and to realize that our successes or our failures are based on the decisions we make as our journey through life comes full circle.


Doerr has composed a story of love, faith and human frailty. About Grace is as much a mystery woven through a contemporary literary novel as it is a story of a family. Readers will feel compassion for David's misadventures and wrong turns and be bolstered by his determination. It's also a story of second chances. A beautiful reminder that it's almost never too late."

Jennifer Fish Decamp, Florida Times-Union

 

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