“His name was David Winkler and he was fifty-nine years old. This would be his first trip home in twenty-five years - if home was what he could still call it. He had been a father, a husband, and a hydrologist…He called them dreams. Not visions exactly, or presentiments or premonitions. Calling them dreams let him edge as close as he could to what they were: sensations - experiences, even - that visited him as he slept and faded after he woke, only to reemerge in the minutes or hours or days to come.”
Those are some lines from the second and third chapters of Pulitzer Prize winning author Anthony Doerr’s novel About Grace. It was when David was a young child that he had his first dream where he witnessed a man hit by a bus and then saw it actually happen days later. It was also as a child that he became fascinated by water and grew up to be a hydrologist. As an adult, he dreamt of meeting Sandy in a market, the woman he married and with whom he had a daughter, Grace. He could recognize the special dreams that he knew would come true. That’s why he ran far, far away when the flood came in which he had foreseen that Grace would drown while he was trying to save her.
For 25 years he lives on the island of Kingston, doing hotel maintenance and befriending a young girl who falls in love with marine life and insects. This book is so rich and so beautiful in its writing. Good Reads says about Doerr, “His compassion for human fragility is extraordinarily moving. In luminous prose, he writes about the power and beauty of nature and about the tiny miracles that transform our lives.”
If you’re interested in reading something by one of the best novelists of our time, then you must read About Grace by Anthony Doerr.
