Can love and honor conquer all?
Mark Helprin’s enchanting and sweeping novel springs from this deceptively simple question, and from the sight of a beautiful young woman, dressed in white, on the Staten Island Ferry, at the beginning of summer, 1946.
Postwar New York glows with energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as they each fall for the other in an instant.
Harry and Catherine pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine’s choice of Harry over her longtime fiancé endangers Harry’s livelihood and eventually threatens his life. In the end, it is Harry’s extraordinary wartime experience that gives him the character and means to fight for Catherine, and risk everything.
Not since Winter’s Tale has Mark Helprin written such a magically inspiring saga. Entrancing in its lyricism, In Sunlight and in Shadow so powerfully draws you into New York at the dawn of the modern age that, as in a vivid dream, you will not want to leave.
Praise for A Soldier of the Great War
“Vast ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing. . . . all in the best traditions of Pasternak. . . just as compelling and satisfying to the reader.”--New York Times Book Review
“Fit to stand alongside the works of Erich Maria Remarque, and, yes, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. . . . Helprin has written a monumental novel . . . . A Soldier of the Great War both stole me from myself and moved me desperately.”--Washington Post Book Review
“One of the most accomplished American novels . . . exquisite without being mannered, unabashedly concerned with the great questions of love and death, beauty and honor . . . . Helprin's prose moves with a stateliness, a majesty, seldom attempted, much less achieved, these days.”--Newsday
“Helprin stands bravely apart . . . taking on all comers with a tone that recalls Hemingway.”--The Boston Globe
“A rousing tale for a long march. . . . With riotous energy and sustained brilliance. . . Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.”--Time
Praise for Winter's Tale
“Is it not astonishing that a work so rooted in fantasy, filled with narrative high jinks and comic flights, stands forth centrally as a moral discourse? It is indeed. . . . I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.”--New York Times Book Review
“Helprin's book is breathtaking. . . . Helprin is splendid, a major talent. . . funnier and shrewder than Thomas Wolfe and much more accurate in his poetic exuberance. . . Though there are suggestions of John Barth in its metaphysical, and John Irving in its anecdotal, discursiveness. Mr. Dooley is there in its sawdust wit, and Paul Goodman's Empire City in its winning and burdensome generosity . . . and, more than anything else, there is Walt Whitman and his lyrical city vision . . . [but] it is not quite like anything else.”--Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Helprin is more than a major writer; he has all the makings of a great one.”--USA Today
