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The Headmaster's Wife [Kindle Edition]

Author: Thomas Christopher Greene | Language: English | ISBN: B00FIL6TVU | Format: PDF, EPUB

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An immensely talented writer whose work has been described as “incandescent” (Kirkus) and “poetic” (Booklist), Thomas Christopher Greene pens a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of one couple at their best and worst.

Inspired by a personal loss, Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man’s memories of his life and loves. Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont’s elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges. Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster’s Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief.
"A truly remarkable novel, I read the second half of The Headmaster’s Wife with my mouth open, my jaw having dropped at the end of the first half. Thomas Christopher Greene knows how to hook a reader and land him." --Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

"An accomplished and artful storyteller, Greene has surprises in store as he unspools a plot that becomes as poignant as it is unpredictable." --Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed

"Greene’s genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov’s classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn’s contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012)." --Booklist
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File Size: 924 KB
Print Length: 286 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250038944
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (February 25, 2014)
Sold by: Macmillan
Language: English
ASIN: B00FIL6TVU
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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#1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
#1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Suspense > Paranormal > Psychics
#8
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Disclosure: ARC provided by Goodreads First Reads/St. Martin's Press.

I never win anything. The last time I won something was circa 1982 and it was a bag of cheezeez. So I was delighted to win one of the ARCs provided by St. Martin’s Press for the upcoming release of The Headmaster’s Wife; a way better prize than a bag of faux-cheese snacks, and, although it was a quick read, way more satisfying.

At its heart, The Headmaster’s Wife is a book about grief. Grief for one’s lost youth, grief for lost love and love lost, and grief over a tragedy that cannot be fully comprehended by the characters. Greene excels at getting into his character’s heads to fully examine their thoughts and motivations, resulting in fully fleshed-out, believable people. At times the tone reminded me of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (and I mean this as a compliment; it’s one of my favourite books); it has similar sturdy but expressive prose and a haunting air of mystery and foreboding as a marriage flails on its last legs before you. The first half of the book is from the headmaster, Arthur Winthrop’s point of view. After being arrested for taking a naked, winter stroll in Central Park, he starts to tell his seemingly straight-forward tale of his life with his wife, Elizabeth, how they have grown apart, how she frets for their son who is serving overseas, and how he has fallen for one of his teenage students. Arthur’s infatuation with his student is bound to be his downfall and as he becomes increasingly erratic in his behaviour, you just know this isn’t going to end well. But Greene deftly pulls the rug out from under you at the mid-point of the book, slides it right out from under your well-planted feet and all you can do as you plummet towards the ground is think “Huhwah?

The Headmaster's Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene is written in a beautiful style that makes the reading of this book compelling. Greene has a way with words that hooks the reader from the first pages. The plot, however, is not as well-considered as I would have liked and I was disappointed by the denouement. It seemed like a deus ex machina, and not at all realistic.

The book starts out with Arthur Winthrop, Headmaster of The Lancaster School in Vermont, a prestigious boarding school, found wandering naked in Central Park. What was he doing out there? The police are interested in his story and as it unravels it becomes obvious that parts of Arthur's mind are confused. He tells the story of a marriage that has soured over the years, with lost intimacy and increased distance between him and his wife Elizabeth. At the same time, Arthur becomes obsessively enamored of a new transfer student named Betsy Pappas. He is willing to risk all for a relationship with her. As the story of Betsy and Arthur unfurls, I found myself gripping the pages for more. However, something felt amiss to me and as the second half of the story fills in the pieces, I found out why.

Arthur and Elizabeth have a son named Ethan who Arthur had hoped would follow in his family's footsteps and become Headmaster of Lancaster School some day. However, upon graduation, and right after 9/11, Ethan joins the army and goes to Iraq. Arthur is furious and Elizabeth is torn up with fear. Ethan is a good person but is not the son that Arthur had hoped he'd be. Elizabeth has tried to protect him from the world but has to let him go.

I found the second half of the book as interesting as the first half. However, I also found it to be implausible towards the end.

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