Book details

Helpless

A Novel

Author: Barbara Gowdy

Helpless

Helpless

$11.99

About This Book

From the internationally acclaimed author of The White Bone and The Romantic, a haunting and suspenseful novel of abduction and obsessive love

Nine-year-old...

Page Count
320
On Sale
04/01/2007

Book Details

From the internationally acclaimed author of The White Bone and The Romantic, a haunting and suspenseful novel of abduction and obsessive love

Nine-year-old Rachel Fox has the face of an angel, a heart-stopping luminosity that strikes all who meet her. Her single mother, Celia, working at a video store by day and a piano bar by night, is not always around to shield her daughter from the attention—both benign and sinister—that her beauty draws. Attention from model agencies, for example, or from Ron, a small-appliance repairman who, having seen Rachel once, is driven to see her again and again.

When a summer blackout plunges the city into darkness and confusion, Rachel is taken from her home. A full-scale search begins, but days pass with no solid clues, only a phone call Celia receives from a woman whose voice she has heard before but cannot place. And as Celia fights her terror and Rachel starts to trust in her abductor's kindness, the only other person who knows where she is wavers between loyalty to the captor and saving the child. Will Rachel be found before her abductor's urge to protect and cherish turns to something altogether less innocent?

Tapping into the fear that lies just below the surface of contemporary city life, Barbara Gowdy draws on her trademark empathy and precision to create a portrait of love at its most consuming and ambiguous and to uncover the volatile point at which desire gives way to the unthinkable.

Imprint Publisher

Metropolitan Books

ISBN

9781429921572

In The News

“What [Barbara Gowdy] does, with bravery and compassion, is explore the immense impact that obsessive love can have on innocent--and not-so-innocent--people.” —People

“Rich in characters . . . Terror and empathy move in lockstep through the final pages of this deeply perceptive novel.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“The reader is gripped by the characters and Gowdy's technical sophistication.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Although she maintains a palpable level of tension . . . [Gowdy] offers a more nuanced psychological focus on a quartet whose relations to one another are both oddly distant and profoundly intimate.” —Los Angeles Times

“Deftly and with the illusion of innocence, [Gowdy] renders the alien native. Hers is a peacemaking genius, unique in its talent for the transition of strangeness to second nature, repulsiveness to sorrow, and insane to ordinary.” —Lydia Millet, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“A nail-biting story told with wonderful quirkiness.” —Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph (UK)

“Harrowing and compelling.” —Chicago Tribune

“A page-turner that finds tension not in the obvious question (Will Rachel be rescued?), but in more personal ones.” —The New York Times

About the Creators

Helpless

Helpless

$11.99