Love, Alice
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Published by: Berkley
Release Date: December 6, 2016
Pages: 432
ISBN13: 978-0451474810
Synopsis
A year ago, Dovie Larkin’s life was shattered when her fiancé committed suicide just weeks before their wedding. Now, plagued by guilt, she has become a fixture at the cemetery where William is buried, visiting his grave daily, waiting for answers she knows will never come.
Then one day, she sees an old woman whose grief mirrors her own. Fascinated, she watches the woman leave a letter on a nearby grave. Dovie ignores her conscience and reads the letter—a mother’s plea for forgiveness to her dead daughter—and immediately needs to know the rest of the story.
As she delves deeper, a collection of letters from the cemetery’s lost and found begins to unravel a decades-old mystery involving one of Charleston’s wealthiest families. But even as Dovie seeks to answer questions about another woman’s past—questions filled with deception, betrayal, and heartbreaking loss—she starts to discover the keys to love, forgiveness, and finally embracing the future...
Add on GoodreadsPraise
“Love, Alice is part romance and part mystery, but at its heart is a beautifully layered story about surviving tragedy and discovering new connections in surprising and unexpected ways. The emotional journeys of the three main characters are made more engrossing by the descriptive language of Ms. Davis's writing and by the Charleston setting that is as much a character as the living, breathing ones.”
—Karen White, New York Times bestselling author of The Sound of Glass
“Love Alice is a masterfully told tale of secrets, lies, and regrets. Wrapped up with a good dollop of southern life, it is a powerful story about how families both hurt and heal one another. I loved every word!”
—Barbara Claypole White, award-winning author of The Perfect Son
“There are few things as delicious as settling down to read a new Barbara Davis novel, and Love, Alice is every bit as intriguing and emotional a story as I’d anticipated. Heartfelt and beautifully written, Love Alice may be Barbara Davis’s finest work yet.”
—Diane Chamberlain, NYT bestselling author of Big Lies in a Small Town
“Once again, Barbara Davis has written a poignant, spellbinding book, with a story and characters that will live on in my heart… an achingly beautiful book.”
—Sue’s Reading Neighborhood
Excerpt
Prologue
Blackhurst Asylum for Unwed Mothers
Cornwall, England
January 6, 1962
The place smells of sickness and damp—of tears and misery and shame.
Alice places a hand on her belly as the familiar flutter comes again, soft beatings like an angel’s wings against her insides. Her baby. Her angel. The wave of sickness comes next, as it always does after the flutterings, a clammy surge of heat and nausea that threatens to buckle her at the knees. She swallows it down, scrubs the sudden damp from her palms, and turns one last time to glance over her shoulder, praying Mam has changed her mind about leaving her in this terrible place, with its cold walls and colder faces.
She hasn’t.
“This way, girl,” comes a disembodied voice from the nameless black-clad nun in front of her. “There’s more here than just you to tend, so be quick.”