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Loading... The Last Time They Met: A Novelby Anita ShreveLibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Wow!! Hold your breath til the end. It's good. ( )I read a little too quickly and totally missed the ending. I am going to re-read. Still reeling from the ending. I felt betrayed by the gimmicky ending...guess I just didn't "get" it! I absolutely loved this book! A little boring in the beginning, but then it picks up. I think I'm going to reread it... something I don't ever do! 0.031 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com's Best of 2001 (ISBN 0316713732, Mass Market Paperback)The Last Time They Met opens with two old lovers, both poets, running into each other at a writer's conference. Well, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes aren't old, actually--just middle-aged, with a lifetime's worth of history between them. In the first section, Anita Shreve only suggests what that history contains: there was adultery, we gather, and a car accident, plus some illicit encounters under a pitiless Kenyan sun. Presumably the rest of the book will lead back to the beginnings of this grand passion, right? We think we know where this is going--but that's the tricky part, because we don't.The novel does get off to a slow start, with an unnecessarily drawn-out description of a luxury hotel. But it picks up speed as it moves backward in time, from the lovers' vividly evoked interlude in Africa, to their adolescent years in the Massachusetts village of Hull, and finally to Linda's deepest, darkest secret. Only then does the author unveil her final revelation, which should leave most readers somewhat out of breath, and possibly even obliged to turn back to the first page and read the book over again. Shreve is a canny storyteller, and she knows her characters inside and out. (As well she might: Thomas is the husband of Jean, the photographer in The Weight of Water.) And The Last Time They Met is yet another example of the kind of book she does best--one that's as skillfully plotted as a thriller, but with writing that lingers long after the last plot twist is unfurled. No matter whether people actually have affairs like these. Reading this book only makes you wish that they did. --Mary Park (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:04 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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