In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin

In Sunlight and in Shadow (original 2012; edition 2012)

by Mark Helprin (Author)

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Returning home after serving in World War II to run his family business in New York, paratrooper Harry Copeland falls in love with young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, who risks everything to break off her engagement to another man.

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Member:	VickieG
Title:	In Sunlight and in Shadow
Authors:	Mark Helprin (Author)
Info:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2012), Edition: First Edition, 720 pages
Collections:	Your library (inactive), Currently reading (inactive), To read
Rating:
Tags:	to-read, to read

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In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin (2012)

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Showing 1-5 of 21 (next | show all)

Mark Helprin surpasses all authors I’ve read in his ability to describe people, places, things, philosophical perspectives, feelings, music, art, moments . . .alright, ANYTHING, and move me to tears in the rapturous sublimity of it all. . .but that doesn’t mean, that while listening to the almost 30 hours of this book that I didn’t experience exasperation, and sadly, in the end, disappointment---maybe even anger over having invested so much time and admiration, for a broken promise that I would put the story away satisfied and content. (

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TraSea | Apr 29, 2024 |

Typical Helprin prose, lyrical and magical. (

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kwskultety | Jul 4, 2023 |

Gave up on it - early going was sappy romance. (

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wordloversf | Aug 14, 2021 |

I really wanted to like Mark Helprin. I floundered through "Winter's Tale" before attempting "in Sunlight and in Shadow," and made it to the requisite one-third point before gladly giving it up. The female protagonist, Catherine, is irritatingly beautiful and graceful and elegant, while stoutly defending her burden of being born to a wealthy family; the male protagonist, Harry, is unengaging and long-winded (or at least is described thus). The prose is lovely in small bites but overwhelmingly choppy and extraneous in a full reading. (

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resoundingjoy | Jan 1, 2021 |

Some interesting quotes

wanderland | Aug 6, 2019 |

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thingScore 63

It’s incredible that this story — or, to be more precise, these stories — hasn’t been told before. Except that, of course, it has, and they have . . . though never before in more than 700 consecutive pages, between the covers of one book.

added by ablachly | editNew York Times, Liesl Schillinger (Oct 5, 2012)

"In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, the new novel [In Sunlight and in Shadow] is a spiritual pendant to 'Winter's Tale,' and every bit as extraordinary. . . . [T]he writing throughout 'In Sunlight and in Shadow' sounds as though it were scored to some great choral symphony."

added by sgump | editWall Street Journal, Sam Sacks (Oct 2, 2012)

Elegant, elegiac novel of life in postwar America, at once realistic and aspirational, by the ever-accomplished Helprin. ... A fine adult love story—not in the prurient sense, but in the sense of lovers elevated from smittenness to all the grown-up problems that a relationship can bring.

added by ablachly | editKirkus (Sep 1, 2012)

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Canonical title

In Sunlight and in Shadow

Original title

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2012

People/Characters

Harry Copeland

Catherine Thomas Hale

Important places

Manhattan, New York, New York, USA

New York, New York, USA

Important events

Related movies

Epigraph

Life-giving Venus, who beneath the gliding
stars of heaven
Fills with your presence the sea that bears our
ships
And the land that bears our crops. . .
You alone govern the nature of things,
And nothing comes forth into the shores of
light
Or is glad or lovely without you. . . .
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I

Dedication

First words

Prologue:
If you were a spirit, and could fly and alight as you wished, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then you might rise to enter an open window high above the park, in the New York of almost a lifetime ago, early in November of 1947.

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In Sunlight and In Shadow

▾Book descriptions

Returning home after serving in World War II to run his family business in New York, paratrooper Harry Copeland falls in love with young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, who risks everything to break off her engagement to another man.

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Book description

Postwar New York glows with energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as they each fall for the other in an instant.

Harry and Catherine pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine’s choice of Harry over her longtime fiancé endangers Harry’s livelihood and eventually threatens his life. In the end, it is Harry’s extraordinary wartime experience that gives him the character and means to fight for Catherine, and risk everything.

Not since Winter’s Tale has Mark Helprin written such a magically inspiring saga. Entrancing in its lyricism, In Sunlight and in Shadow so powerfully draws you into New York at the dawn of the modern age that, as in a vivid dream, you will not want to leave.

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