The Last Time They Met

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

Product Description
At a literary festival, a poet named Linda Fallon meets, for the first time in years, fellow poet Thomas Janes, whose fame has grown during a decade of seclusion. This is no chance meeting, however, since Thomas saw where Linda was scheduled to appear and chose that moment to re-establish contact with the woman he passionately pursued years earlier, in an affair that ended disastrously. As the story moves backward, it examines the extraordinary resonance a single choice, even a single word, can have over the course of a lifetime.