Book Review: About Grace by Anthony Doerr

“I loved this wonderful book – its strangeness, its obsessiveness, its beautiful sentences.’ – Author Monica Ali

There’s nothing like winning a Pulitzer Prize to get the world to take notice of your novels and Anthony’s Doerr’s beautiful, Pulitzer Prize winning, All the Light We Cannot See, certainly did that for him.

If you’ve read All the Light We Cannot See and if, like so many others, you loved it, then there’s another treat in store as Doerr’s Australian publishers, HarperCollins, release a new edition of his earlier, 2004 novel, About Grace.

About Grace features vastly different subject matter but still has Doerr’s sensitivity, otherworldliness and it’s a book that utterly absorbs you into its world.

David Winkler is a man who has strange and vivid, prophetic dreams. Sometimes the dreams are harmless – he will see the overhead locker on an airplane come open and then it happens. Other times, it’s more sinister. As a solitary child growing up in Alaska he dreamed of a terrible accident and then it became a reality.

As an adult with a family this memory becomes traumatic – what if he dreams something bad happens to his beloveds? Could it come true?

David is a hydrologist, a scientist rooted in the natural world, making his obsession with this otherness more compelling, Soon after he runs way with another man’s wife, from Alaska to Ohio, the fear of his dreams becomes all-consuming and he finds that the only way he can guarantee his loved ones are out of harm’s way, is to remove himself from them, despite the depths of his love for them.

In his bid to escape this nightmare, Winkler ends up in the far flung Caribbean island of St Vincente where he spends years, never quite making enough to get himself back to the US. It’s more than 20 years later that he steels himself to return, face his fears and find out what became of his family.

This a stunningly beautiful book about fate and enduring love.

READ MORE:

The rise and rise of Anthony Doerr’s novel All The Light We Cannot See in the Sydney Morning Herald

About Grace: Dream Lover The New York Times

To purchase a copy or find out more on About Grace click here.