The Years - Softcover

The Years is about the passage of time: from youth to middle age to the winter of life. Forty years after their intense but doomed college romance, Lawrence and Hermia meet again on a Mediterranean cruise. They fall in love even more deeply, but being in their sixties, with plenty of baggage, they wonder if marriage is the right move. When Lawrence visits Hermia’s home on Cape Cod, she has one request: “Please stay.” What happens when he does fills the rest of this wise and unforgettable novel.

With enormous sympathy and keen insight, Nicholas Delbanco follows Hermia and Lawrence through their years together and apart, in Los Angeles and New York, Michigan and Massachusetts, in frailness and in health. Old scores are settled; old wounds healed. A stunning, wise book about first and final love, The Years addresses the irrevocable end of life...and what ultimately endures.

Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He has published twenty-eight books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall, while his most recent works of nonfiction are Lastingness: The Art of Old Age and The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts. As an editor, he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. The long-term director of the MFA program as well as the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, he has served as chair of the fiction panel for the National Book Awards and a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship.