A compelling new novel about three generations of a family haunted by an obsessive love, from the author of
Practical Magic and
Here on EarthOn the night that Arlyn Singer’s father dies, she is certain her destiny will find her. Some hours later a young man shows up at her door. Lost in a strange town, John Moody is an architectural student, serious, reserved, and deliberate. And he has no inkling that the tall, red-haired girl whom he has asked for directions will haunt him for the rest of his life.
John Moody takes Arlyn to live in a house made of glass, the Glass Slipper. Her life there is not the romantic destiny she envisaged. She dreams of escape for herself and her children, Sam and Blanca, but her eventual escape, too, is not the one she dreamed of...
Years later, Arlyn is gone, and Meredith Weiss arrives at the Moody house. Sam, now a teenager, is careening down a path of drug-fuelled self-destruction, while John Moody is tormented by visions of a red-haired woman in white. Meredith sets out to try to save this troubled family. But will her devotion be enough to pull them back from the fate they seem to have chosen for themselves?
Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules and have their own secrets. Told with Alice Hoffman’s signature grace and originality,
Skylight Confessions is a shimmering, powerful story of passion, heartbreak and families.
Author Biography
Alice Hoffman
is the bestselling author of eighteen acclaimed novels, including
The Ice Queen, Practical Magic, Here on Earth, The River King, Blue Diary, Illumination Night, Turtle Moon, Seventh Heaven, and
At Risk. She lives in Massachusetts.
Reviews
Visually stunning, frequently heart-wrenching,Hoffman is, in many ways, that much-misunderstood phenomenon: a novelist of ideas…This central idea of her work…is what makes the novels she has produced to date (every one a genuine page-turner) both more interesting and more rewarding than either Hollywood, or some critics, realise,Alice Hoffman’s novels are a beguiling mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Bitter everyday occurrences – broken marriages, disappointed lives – are transformed under her tender gaze into magical, heart-breaking fables… Hoffman acknowledges the weight of this pain in mesmerisingly graceful prose, while the spareness of her style allows for hope’s infinite possibilities in even the most daunting of circumstances,A gentle, literary entertainment,The dream-like nature of the narrative is well constructed and oddly plausible,
Skylight Confessions leaves us sad, yet satisfied, as though we have eaten something bitter yet organic. The Greeks might have called the feeling catharsis...the Moodys are reminiscent of an ancient tragic house,Fans of
The Time Traveller’s Wife will love this… this is a magical, heartbreaking book,Hoffman… is an excellent storyteller with a beguilingly mystical bent
