Books

Stella Bain

By Anita Shreve (Hardcover Book, 2013)
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.

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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.

Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of 16 previous novels, including Rescue, A Change in Altitude; Testimony; The Pilot's Wife, which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England's Orange prize. She lives in Massachusetts.

  • PRAISE FOR RESCUE:

    "A beautiful novel about the limits of forgiveness and the fragility of family. Pitch-perfect all the way to the final line."

  • "Shreve knows love may be intense, life-changing, and passionate, but it is never enough....This is Shreve at her best."

    (Associated Press).

  • "Fans of Anita Shreve will likely devour this new novel..." (Entertainment Weekly).

  • "Engrossing...With the insistent thrum of life-and-death EMT calls as background, Shreve's vividly told tale captures the deep-seated fears of mortality and loneliness that can drive us to test the bounds of family and forgiveness." (People).

  • "Riveting....The prose is characteristically Shreve-spare." (USA Today).

  • "Shreve creates a world, peoples it with believable characters, and puts them through agonizing and joyful moments without a false note or a dissonant figure of speech....No one can create the beginning of a complex relationship like Shreve."
    ---Brigitte Weeks, Washington Post

Formats

Product Details

Stella Bain
  • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
  • Price: $28.00 US/$31.00 CAN
  • Pages: 272
  • Physical Dimensions: 6" x 9-1/4"
  • ISBN-13: 9780316098861
  • On Sale Date: 11/12/2013
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