Almost Heaven is an intellectually dazzling, emotionally incandescent story of memory and the redemptive power of love. Holden Garfield is a foreign correspondent, burnt out before he's thirty, who comes back to Virginia to try to forget his experiences of war abroad and to find new hope in his life. What he finds, instead, is a woman who is desperate for his help. Through a chance phone call, Holden learns that his mentor's sister, Melanie, is hospitalized in Richmond with hysterical amnesia after her husband and sons were killed in a freak act of nature. Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and almost at once the two embark on a passionate love affair--one fighting to remember, the other yearning to forget. Memory. Passion. Loss. The ravages of extreme forces of nature . . . These are the themes Marianne Wiggins weaves through Almost Heaven with the same effects she so brilliantly deployed in her previous classic, John Dollar. In Almost Heaven she brings her dramatic force home, writing not only a whirlwind love story but a personal love letter to the American South. Read Less