Beginning on the night of the Grand Illumination, a festival of lanterns held each summer on Martha’s Vineyard, this novel is a modern chronicle of a marriage and a bittersweet exploration of an extraordinary passion. Illumination Night follows the lives of a young blond giant who is as beautiful as he is frightening; an old woman at the end of her life whose last mission is to save her granddaughter’s soul; a family torn apart by a wife’s fears and a husband’s unrealized desires; and the high school girl who comes to Martha’s Vineyard against her will, who steals husbands and cars, and who will bring everyone together in a web of yearning, sin, and ultimate redemption. Both riveting and reflective, this is a story that brings to light the talent that has made Alice Hoffman an acclaimed bestselling author.
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“Alice Hoffman…has enough power of
empathy to make her characters matter to us. Daringly mixing comedy with
tragedy, and the quotidian with the fabulous, she has created a narrative that
somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage…Ms. Hoffman writes so simply about human
passions that her characters are branded onto one’s memory. At their most
passionate they hurl themselves down staircases, out of windows, in front of
speeding cars. One awakens from the dream of this novel with a memory of trying
to catch them. In the light of the story’s afterglow, one keeps on trying to
catch them.”
—
New York Times