Properties of Thirst is a novel that is both universal and intimate. It is the story of a changing American landscape and an examination of one of the darkest periods in this country's past, told through the stories of the individual loves and losses that weave together to form the fabric of our shared history.
Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes the familiar sunshine and rolling hills of Virginia will help him put aside the horrors he reported. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor's sister, who is institutionalized with a mysterious amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature. Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair—one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget. With this breakneck story of love and loss, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is a series of powerful metaphors for the curative forces of love as well as her own personal love letter to the American South.
A survivial handbook. Babe is the oldest story on earth—and the newest. Maggie and Brigand separate and are divorced. The young wife is left with their child and begins the struggle as a mother, a woman at work, and a lover. She learns that if people are constantly renewed—virtually reborn—they can survive. In her first novel, Marianne Wiggins endows this oldest and newest story with freshness and originality.
A collection of 13 richly articulate and remarkably realized stories that confirm Marianne Wiggins as one of the most original voices in American fiction today.
"Eloquent . . . These stories are rich and challenging." —New York Newsday
