The listing, All He Ever Wanted has ended.
"Shreve's characters carry the resonance of an enduring literary novel, and her plot charges for-ward with the speed of a good summer read." Rocky Mountain News
Just to name one review.
What is a woman's price? From the bestselling author of The Last TimeThey Met comes a brilliant new novel about love,jealousy, and loss.
Etna Bliss has just moved to the New England town where her uncle teaches college when her life is transformed ina single stroke. She is dining in a hotel downtown when a fire forces her to escape to the snowy streets outside. Amid the smoke and chaos of the night she glimpsed, standing under streetlight, by a man who was dining in the same room -- a man who is so overwhelmed by the sight of her that he rebuids his life around a single goal: to marry Etna Bliss.
That man is Nicholas Van Tassel, and All He Ever Wanted is his account of how two lives changed from that tumultuous night forward. A proud and orderly man, Van Tassel is ill equipped to deal with the ferocity of love. But he is determined to have the erocity of love. But he is determined to have Etna, no matter what the cost. Riding a train south many years later, he unwinds his memories of the drama that followed and struggles to understand the mystery his life became on the night.
This is no ordinary tale of obsession. All He Ever Wanted is a story about diffeerent kinds of lave, different ideas of what love is, and how lives can be strainded to breaking over those differeences. It is a powerful eploration of the music and silences of family life, the unhinging forces of desire, the wrenching power of secrets unrevealed, and the bewildering territoriies of betrayal and loss. Written with the maturity,Beauty, Intelligence, and Grace that are Anita Shreve's hallmards, All He Ever Wanted is a story that powerfully conjured another time and place--peopled by unforgettable characters as real as the emotins that bring them together.
Written on inside flap of book cover.