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Sign up todayThe Dive From Clausen's Pier - Abridged
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Learn moreA suspenseful, richly layered first novel that asks: How much do we owe the people we love?
THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER will speak to all those who have ever thought about leaving when they knew they should stay, anyone who has ever felt trapped, not only by circumstance, but by the strength of their own love, Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She's had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, for as long as anyone can remember. But when her fiance, Mike is paralyzed by a tragic accident, Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and about the meaning of home.
Ann Packer has written a morally complex, deeply satisfying novel about the desire to live fully and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves. A magnificent debut from a remarkable new talent.
Ann Packer's stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines, as well as in Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards. She is the author of Mendocino and Other Stories, published by Chronicle Books (1994). She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children.
Reviews
"The novels it calls most to mind. . . . are Allegra Goodman's 'Kaaterskill Falls' and Sue Miller's 'The Good Mother'. . . .its most admirable trait -- and surely the one that will define Packer's future work -- is its moral authenticity." --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe"The Dive from Clausen's Pier is one of those small miracles that reinforce our faith in fiction. It does what the best novels so often do, making the largest things visible by its perfect rendering of life on the smaller scale. It is witty, tragic and touching, and beguiling from the first page." --Scott Turow
"A reflective and probing first novel...there's not a false note in the story's tentative resolution, which thwarts our initial expectations in order to satisfy more complex demands...Very fine fiction indeed." --Kirkus Reviews
"This is the sort of book one reads dying to know what happens to the characters, but loves for its wisdom: it sees the world with more clarity than you do." --Publishers Weekly
"Ann Packer’s first novel has all the weight of reality, tooled with a jeweler’s precision. The Dive from Clausen's Pier is a poignant and painstakingly rendered account of a woman in flight from catastrophe, in search of herself."--Madison Smartt Bell Expand reviews
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