Paradise Close
In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade--fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support--finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise's struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the '70s.
Decades later, on the brink of Trump's America, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he's nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What's become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.
These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.
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Kaleidoscopic and moving, Lisa Russ Spaar's debut novel Paradise Close seamlessly spans the decades of her singular characters' lives and their inextricable connections to one another. At the heart of this work is a convergence of secrets catalogued with longing. Spaar looks closely and intently at such fractured desires, piecing them back together, all while offering a culminating rush of heartbreak to the bloodstream.--Jon Pineda, author of Let's No One Get Hurt
