The Weight of Water: A Novel

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The Weight of Water: A Novel

Author: Anita Shreve
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Publisher: Little, Brown
More than a century after someone murders two people on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire, a photographer comes to shoot a photo essay about the famous crime. As she investigates the bleak, isolated lives of the victims, she comes to identify with their spiritual loneliness. For her own marriage is falling apart, crumbling into nights of heavy drinking and terrible silences.

Incited by the chaotic forces that blasted the island years ago, this modern woman is drawn inexorably toward the violence of the past, toward choices that will destroy all she has ever valued. With exquisitely stylish prose and arresting psychological insight, Anita Shreve captures one woman’s journey into the farthest extremes of emotion.

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Reviews

Amazon.com

A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational ax murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. (Can you guess which one?) She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness. The plot weaves between the narrative of the eyewitness and Jean’s private struggle with jealousies and suspicions as her marriage teeters. A rich, textured novel.

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The Weight of Water

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This complicated mystery, directed with passionate intensity by Katherine Bigelow (Near Dark), deserves better than the paltry distribution it received in theaters. Granted, it’s a tough sell: a contrast between the emotional unrest in a group of modern travelers and a hundred-year-old murder case on a desolate New England island. A photographer (Catherine McCormack) is researching the old case, and we flip back and forth between time periods as she uncovers new clues. The parallel-story structure is often tricky to pull off in movies, and Bigelow, working…
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