Mirror Lake
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
My name is Nathan Carter. Let me say that even though this story does not concern me - not directly anyway - I feel an obligation to tell it, because it was told to me, and it is the type of story that needs to be told...
So begins this powerful tale of love, loss and redemption, drawing us into the small town of Eden, Vermont, and into the complex lives of two very different men. Nathan Carter is a young man in love with falling in love. A serial monogamist, he flits from woman to woman until, as yet another relationship disintegrates, he leaves his busy Boston lifestyle behind him and drives north to the small town of Eden.
There he meets Wallace Fiske: a man at the end of his life. A man with a story to tell. And as the surly, gruff Wallace starts to tell Nathan his story - the story of Nora, the woman he loved from the moment he first set eyes on her, the story of the man Wallace used to be - the two men become friends. It's a friendship - and a story - that will change Nathan forever...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greene tells a predictable story of infidelity, love, loss and male bonding in this well-crafted but somewhat stale first novel. Nathan Carter is the 30-something protagonist who finds himself emotionally bereft after the death of his father, so much so that he drives north from Boston to Vermont and ends up starting a new life as a rural mailman. After a weather-related accident on his delivery route, Carter befriends 79-year-old widower Wallace Fiske, who helps Carter sort out his troubled love life while slowly revealing the story of his marriage to a woman named Nora. The farmer describes the pivotal crisis in his marriage, when a farmhand became attracted to his wife, a fierce attachment that led inexorably to violence. Greene is a reasonably engaging storyteller; the relationship between the two men develops in intimate, minimalist scenes that capture the flavor of smalltown life. The female characters aren't as well developed as their male counterparts, however, and on the whole readers may feel that Greene paints his characters in familiar, bland strokes: "We were each running from something. I was running from my father's death and from the shallowness of a life incomplete without shiny, new love. Wallace was running from something far more profound: a past that haunted him, a past he could not escape, and a story he had never told to anyone."
