Stella Bain

Contributors

By Anita Shreve

Formats and Prices

Price

$16.99

Price

$22.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 27, 2014. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

An epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I, from bestselling author Anita Shreve.

When an American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell shock in an exclusive garden in London, surgeon August Bridge and his wife selflessly agree to take her in.

A gesture of goodwill turns into something more as Bridge quickly develops a clinical interest in his houseguest. Stella had been working as a nurse’s aide near the front, but she can’t remember anything prior to four months earlier when she was found wounded on a French battlefield.

In a narrative that takes us from London to America and back again, Shreve has created an engrossing and wrenching tale about love and the meaning of memory, set against the haunting backdrop of a war that destroyed an entire generation.

Genre:

  • "Harrowing. . . . With the story of this one woman, Shreve gives shape to the larger world of the Great War." ---Carol Iaciofano, NPR
  • "Spare, elegant. . . . Shreve's fans will appreciate her keen understanding of women's struggles to live life on their own terms." ---Helen Rogan, People
  • "Compelling. . . . Shreve cleverly and movingly shifts between Stella's two lives." ---Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
  • "Touching, heartbreaking, sometimes so vivid you can almost feel the fear." ---Karen Campbell, Boston Globe
  • "Fascinating....A slender novel with a large and complex subject." ---Carolyn See, Washington Post

On Sale
May 27, 2014
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316098892

Anita Shreve

About the Author

Anita Shreve passed away on Thursday, March 29 after a long and very private fight with cancer.  Anita was the author of 18 novels, 14 of which were published by Little, Brown, beginning with Resistance in 1997.  Her novel The Weight of Water won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.  In 1999, Oprah Winfrey selected The Pilot’s Wife for Oprah’s Book Club, and it went on to sell more than 3 million copies.  In all of her work, Anita deftly explored the intricacies and nuances of relationships between men and women, often hinging on the ripple effects of a single, dramatic moment.  She wrote the details of history, from the 19th century to the 1920s to World War II, as if she had lived them herself.

Of her novel Rescue, Augusten Borroughs said,  “Her prose is so flawlessly disciplined and elegant; the characters seem too real to be made out of words and the story she unfolds is gripping, fiercely intelligent and deeply moving.”  These words describe the work but also Anita herself.  Anita was a beloved figure for all of us who had the privilege of working with her.  She was both elegant and modest, kind, funny, and always observant of every nuance of human interaction.  She had impeccable taste and was a thoughtful gift-giver, with a warm laugh and an abiding love for her Boston Red Sox, the Maine coastline, the occasional light beer, and, above all, her children.  She was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and friend and we will miss her deeply.  Our thoughts are with her family in this difficult time.

 

Learn more about this author