Signal Fires: A novel - Hardcover

Shapiro, Dani

 
9780593534724: Signal Fires: A novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593534727 ISBN 13: 9780593534724
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BEST SELLER • From the beloved author of Inheritance: "a haunting, moving, and propulsive exploration of family secrets” (Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings)

Two families. One night. A constellation of lives changed forever.

A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year

An ancient majestic oak stands beneath the stars on Division Street. And under the tree sits Ben Wilf, a retired doctor, and ten-year-old Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant, lonely boy who is pointing out his favorite constellations. Waldo doesn’t realize it but he and Ben have met before. And they will again, and again. Across time and space, and shared destiny.

Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret—one which will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own.. Spanning fifty kaleidoscopic years, on a street—and in a galaxy—where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined.

Urgent and compassionate, Signal Fires is a magical story for our times, a literary tour de force by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers. A luminous meditation on family, memory, and the healing power of interconnectedness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DANI SHAPIRO is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani's book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, is being reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 2023. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

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Sarah and Theo

And it’s nothing, really, or might be nothing, or ought to be nothing, as he leans his head forward to press the tip of his cigarette to the car’s lighter. It sizzles on contact, a sound particular to its brief moment in history, in which cars have lighters and otherwise sensible fifteen-year-olds choke down Marlboro Reds and drive their mothers’ Buicks without so much as a learner’s permit. There’s a girl he wants to impress. Her name is Misty Zimmerman, and if she lives through this night, she will grow up to be a magazine editor, or a high school teacher, or a defense lawyer. She will be a mother of three or remain childless. She will die young of ovarian cancer or live to know her great-grandchildren.

But these are only a few possible arcs to a life, a handful of shooting stars in the night sky. Change one thing and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped. His foot on the gas. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but that won’t stop him. He’s all jacked up just like a fifteen-year-old boy. He has something to prove. To himself. To Misty. To his sister. It’s as if he’s following a script written in Braille, his fingers running across code he doesn’t understand.

“Theo, slow down.” That’s his sister, Sarah, from the backseat.

Misty’s riding shotgun.

It was Sarah who tossed him the keys to their mom’s car. Sarah, age seventeen. After this night, she will become unknowable to him. The summer sky is a veil thrown over the moon and stars. The streets are quiet, the good people of Avalon long since tucked in for the night. Their own parents are asleep in their queen-size bed under the plaid afghan knitted by one of their father’s patients. His mom is a deep sleeper, but his dad has been trained by a lifetime as a doctor to bolt awake at the slightest provocation. He is always ready.

The teenagers aren’t looking for trouble. They’re good kids—everyone would say so. But they’re bored; it’s the end of summer; school will resume next week. Sarah’s going into her senior year, after which she’ll be gone. She’s a superstar, his sister. Varsity this, honors that. Bristling with potential. Theo has three years left, and he’s barely made a mark. He’s a chubby kid whose default is silence and shame. He blushes easily. He can feel his cheeks redden as he holds the lighter and inhales, hears the sizzle, draws smoke deep into his lungs. His father—a pulmonary surgeon—would kill him. Maybe that’s why Sarah threw him the keys. Maybe she’s trying to help—to get him to act, goddamnit. To take a risk. Better to be bad than to be nothing.

Misty Zimmerman is just a girl along for the ride. It was Sarah who asked her to come. Sarah, doing for Theo what Theo cannot do for himself. Change one thing and everything changes. The Buick speeds down Poplar Street. Misty stretches and yawns in the passenger seat. Theo turns left, then right. He’s getting the hang of this. He flicks the directional, then heads onto the parkway. As they pass the mall, he looks to see if Burger King is still open.

“Watch it!” Sarah yells.

He swerves back into his lane, heart racing. He almost hit the guardrail. He gets off the parkway at the next exit and eases up on the gas. This was maybe a bad idea. He wants to go home. He also wants another cigarette.

“Pull over,” Sarah says. “I’ll drive.”

Theo looks for a good spot to stop. He has no idea how to park. Sarah’s right—this is stupid.

“Actually no, forget it. I shouldn’t,” she says.

They’re almost home. It’s like a song in his head: Almost home, almost home, almost home. Just a few blocks to go. They pass the Hellers’ house, the Chertoffs’.

As he leans forward, the lighter slips through Theo’s fingers and drops into his open shirt collar. He lets out a yelp and tries to grab it, which only makes matters worse. He arches his back to shake the burning metal thing loose, but it’s wedged between his shorts and his belly. The smell of singed flesh. A perfect shiny half-moon will remain. Years from now, when a lover traces the scar on his stomach and asks how he got it, he will roll away. But now—now their futures shoot like gamma rays from the moving car. Three high school students. What if Sarah had gone out with her friends instead, that night? What if Misty had begged off? What if Theo had succumbed to his usual way of being, and fixed himself a salami sandwich with lots of mustard and taken it with him to bed?

The wheel spins. The screams of teenagers in the night. Theo no stop jesus fuck help god and there is no screech of brakes—nothing to blunt the impact. A concussion of metal and an ancient oak: the sound of two worlds colliding.

The fender and right side of the Buick crumple like it’s a toy and this is all make-believe. Upstairs, on the second floor of Benjamin and Mimi Wilf’s home, a light blinks on. A window opens. Ben Wilf stares down at the scene below for a fraction of a second. By the time he’s made it to the front door, his daughter, Sarah, is standing before him—thank god thank god thank god—her tee shirt and her face splattered with blood. Theo is on all fours on the ground. He seems to be in one piece. Thank god thank god thank god. But then—

“There’s a girl in the car, Dad—”

Misty Zimmerman is unconscious. She isn’t wearing a seat belt—who wears seat belts?—and there’s a gash in her forehead from which blood is gushing. There’s no time to call an ambulance. If they wait for EMTs to get here, the girl will be gone. So Ben does what’s necessary. He leans into the driver’s door, hooks two hands beneath the girl’s armpits, and drags her out.

“Your shirt, Theo!” he barks.

Theo’s belly roils. He’s about to be sick. He pulls his shirt off and throws it to his father. Ben lifts Misty’s head, then wraps the shirt tightly around her skull in a tourniquet. His mind has gone slow and quiet. He’s a very good doctor. He feels for the girl’s pulse.

Mimi is on the front steps now, her nightgown billowing in the wind that seems to have kicked up out of nowhere.

“What happened?” Mimi screams. “Sarah? Theo?”

“It was me, Mom,” Sarah says. “I was driving.”

Theo stares at his sister.

“That doesn’t matter now,” Ben says softly.

Up and down Division Street, their neighbors have awakened. The crash, the voices, the electricity in the air. Someone must have called it in. In the distance, the wail of a siren. Ben knows before he knows, in that deep instinctual way. He couldn’t see in the dark when he dragged the girl out of the car. He registered only the head wound, the uncontrollable bleeding. He now knows: her neck is broken. And he has done the worst thing imaginable. He has moved her. In the days to come, he will tell the story to the authorities, to the life-support team, to Misty’s parents. The story—that Sarah was driving, with Misty riding shotgun and Theo in the backseat—will not be questioned. Not this night, not ever. It will become the deepest kind of family secret, one so dangerous that it will never be spoken.

December 21, 2010

Benjamin

The boy is at his window again. It is 10:45 at night, surely a time boys his age—he is nearing his eleventh birthday—should be asleep in their beds, dreaming their...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593534727
ISBN 13 
9780593534724
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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