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Zusatztext The Los Angeles Times Book Review As in The Man Who Owned Vermont! his widely acclaimed first work of fiction! Bret Lott once again depicts a young couple who struggle with difficulties in their marriage.... A Stranger's House lives! breathes -- and is indeed breathtakingly real. Informationen zum Autor Bret Lott is the author of five highly acclaimed novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger's House, Jewel, Reed's Beach, and The Hunt Club, as well as two collections of widely anthologized short stories, A Dream of Old Leaves and How to Get Home, and a memoir, Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. He lives with his wife and two sons near Charleston, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston and Vermont College. Klappentext For a long time, Claire and Tom Templeton have wished in vain for a child. What they have instead is a house, a charming old Cape that is their consolation. In the gray chill of a Massachusetts autumn, the Templetons and two local handymen, loners and eccentrics, work to rebuild the ramshackle home. As the house takes on a new life, Claire begins to understand its tangled history -- and to reconcile her own past and renew her hope for the future. Chapter One, from Part One: September "Remote," I said. I was at the window, the glass dirty with rain-spattered dust. Just outside the window the forest began, thick with pine and birch and oak and maple. The first trees began not five feet away. The realtor, behind me, said, "Remote is what you and your husband asked for." She giggled, and I pictured her: gold sport coat, brown polyester skirt, black pumps. Her hands would be folded together in front of her, head cocked to one side, a smile across her face that would show as many teeth as possible. I pictured her in the empty room, the room, house, entire barn and parcel empty, she had told us, for fifteen years. Still I didn't turn to her, but only looked out the window, the trees heavy with shadow now, the sun already down behind them. "But not too remote," she went on. "Not too. Twenty-five minutes from Northampton. That's not that bad, considering what you'll be getting: this lovely place with twelve acres and that beautiful barn out there. It's just what the doctor ordered." She laughed again. I heard her step back, heard the soft click of her shoes across the linoleum. Sounds came from upstairs, footsteps cracking across the floors up there, then slow steps on the stairs behind me. I turned to the sound. Tom said, "The floors up there seem sturdy enough." He had one hand on the banister and was moving down at an angle, almost sideways. "These stairs'll take some getting used to, though." He came to a small landing where another set led to the other upstairs room; below the landing were no banisters, and I watched as my husband took each step carefully, his hands out to either side to keep his balance. The realtor had turned to Tom, too. "A good-morning staircase," she said, her hands clasped at her chest. "The original. The less space a staircase took up, the more living space there was. That shows what intelligent builders they were." She turned to me, her smile just as I had imagined it would be: all teeth, cinnamon lipstick to match her outfit. I said, "But remote, I guess, is what we want." I looked from the realtor to Tom. "I guess it's not that far out." He shrugged, went to the fireplace, squatted to look up the chimney. "And it's a Cape, a three-quarter Cape," she said. "Just what you wanted, and it needs plenty of work." She moved across the room to the staircase. "You know, we like to call these a Handyman's Dream. That's what we call them." She looked around the room, that smile still there. I looked around then, too. Cheap plastic paneling had been nailed to the walls, pieces of it cracked and broken back at the corners to show pale, flowered wallpaper. The linoleum, light ...
