Quickening - Michelle Hoover

Quickening, The

See Larger Photo	Category :	Historical

	Publisher :	Blackstone Audio Inc
	Author :	Michelle Hoover
	Narrator :	Carrington MacDuffie and Bernadette Dunne

	Length :	6 hours 52 minutes (Unabridged)

Download Price :		$16.99

Format :		Downloadable MP3

World English

© 2010 Blackstone Audio Inc

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“In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover’s characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A vivid, pastoral panorama…imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism.”—Kirkus Reviews “From the opening pages of this beautiful novel, I found myself immersed in the lives of these two farm women between the wars and their struggles with their families, themselves, the land and each other. The Quickening is such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it’s hard to believe it is a debut, but it is and a sparkling one.”—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street, winner of the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, but for the deeply religious Mary, farming is at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on. Despite having little in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threatens to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well. In this luminous and unforgettable debut, Michelle Hoover explores the polarization of the human soul in times of hardship and the instinctual drive for self-preservation by whatever means necessary. The Quickening stands as a novel of lyrical precision and historical consequence, reflecting the resilience and sacrifices required even now in our modern troubled times. Michelle Hoover has published fiction in Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New American Voices, and others.She has been a Bread Loaf Writer’sConference scholar, the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, aMacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee,and the 2005 winner of the PEN/NewEngland Discovery Award for Fiction. Shewas born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughterof four longtime farming families.

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