This is a beautiful book. I wasn't sure at first, I guess because it takes a while to figure out what story is being told. The book is in three tones: one is the story of the young woman Ann Grant attending her friend's wedding and falling in love with another guest, another is of Ann Lord, who is Ann Grant after three marriages and four children, who is in and out of lucidity on her deathbed, the third, and shortest, is a dialogue between two voices that are never explicitly named. The three streams cut across one another and give a lovely succinct sense of this woman's life (and possibly a sense of her afterlife, depending on your reading of the incorporeal dialogue stream).
Ann Lord She has her four children around her in her final days, but her thoughts are much less on them than on all the men in her life. I particularly liked the way the three husbands get condensed sometimes -- those experiences of falling in love that seem so unique in the moment become fungible at a remove, when evaluating what mattered over a whole life.
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