Dimensions
225 x 145 x 23mm
The summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at a writer's colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterwards, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in an almost holy friendship, one that takes over u and changes the course of u their lives. Bernard is a poet u well-born, Harvard-educated, gregarious, passionate. Frances is a fiction writer u daughter of a middle-class Irish family, wry, fairly (and often unfairly) judgemental. She is deeply Catholic; he is a convert who yearns to sound out matters of the spirit. He is well into his writing career; she is looking for a way into New York literary life. So begins an extraordinary novel told in absorbing correspondence that explores faith, creativity, depression, passion, what it means to be a true friend, and the nature of acceptable sacrifice. How much should we give up for those we love? Inspired by the real-life friendship between two giants of American letters, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell, this epistolary novel stands witness to the wonder of kindred spirits and bittersweet romance, and transports us to 1950s New York, in all its glamour and zip. Fiercely intelligent and charmingly sassy, Frances andamp; Bernard is a sparkling tribute to the power of friendship.
