Almost Heaven: A Novel

With this breakneck story of love and loss, the award-winning author of Evidence of Things Unseen and Properties of Thirst, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is a series of powerful metaphors for the curative forces of love as well as her own personal love letter to the American South.

Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes the familiar sunshine and rolling hills of Virginia will help him put aside the horrors he reported. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor’s sister, who is institutionalized with a mysterious amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature. Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair--one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget.

Marianne Wiggins is the author of seven books of fiction, including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She lives in California.