The Last Time They Met: A Novel
by Anita Shreve
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anita ShreveEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-11-01
ISBN: 0316713732
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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- Anita Shreve paperbacks
- fiction
Book Reviews of The Last Time They Met: A Novel
Book Review: Ouch. That unbearable foreknowledge of loss...
Summary: 5 Stars
Another Anita Shreve's hit, sober, heart-wrenching and full of texture. I had no idea it had a connection to one of her previous books, "The Weight Of Water", which I read years ago (and liked very much). It connects us with one smaller character in that book, Linda, but it is not necessary to read its predecessor to get into this one, as it is not a sequel.
Linda and Thomas meet and fall in love as teenagers, but the story unfolds backwards, after a chance meeting in Toronto, when they are both in their fifties. They have not seen each other in twenty-six years. Their past life with all its joys, flaws and pains resurfaces. The anatomy of a very deep, moving true love is described with such emotional substance, its essence never lost to the reader.
And the end. The surprising ending. I found this novel to be a page-turner and possibly the best one I've read by this author (I've read almost everything written by Ms. Shreve). A love story to be remembered.
Summary of The Last Time They Met: A Novel
From the last time Linda and Thomas meet, at a charmless hotel in a distant city, to the moment, thirty-five years earlier, when a chance encounter on a rocky beach binds them fatefully together, this hypnotically compelling novel unfolds a tale of intense passion, drama, and suspense. The Last Time They Met is a singularly ambitious and accomplished work by one of today's most widely celebrated novelists.The Last Time They Met opens with two old lovers, both poets, running into each other at a writer's conference. Well, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes aren't old, actually--just middle-aged, with a lifetime's worth of history between them. In the first section, Anita Shreve only suggests what that history contains: there was adultery, we gather, and a car accident, plus some illicit encounters under a pitiless Kenyan sun. Presumably the rest of the book will lead back to the beginnings of this grand passion, right? We think we know where this is going--but that's the tricky part, because we don't.
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
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