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Torch
Garnering remarkable praise and rave reviews, award-winning writer Cheryl Strayed emphatically delivers with her debut novel, Torch, now available in paperback, the moving story of a family struck down by random fate and how it learns to heal. Writing with insight, compassion, and humor, Strayed reveals her "gift of getting to the core of the human condition" (Kirkus Reviews).
Teresa Rae Wood is a local celebrity in the town of Midden, Minnesota. Her popular radio show, Modern Pioneers!, a kind of hippie Prairie Home Companion, is an eternal embarrassment to her two almost-grown children, Claire and Joshua, and a source of amused pride to her common-law husband, Bruce. When Teresa summons Claire and Joshua home unexpectedly, they are floored by her devastating news: Teresa, only thirty-eight, is dying of cancer; seven weeks later she is gone.
Now the mundane irritations and small betrayals of family relationships loom dangerously large, as Claire, Joshua, and Bruce — retreating into private worlds of sorrow just when they need one another the most — seek comfort elsewhere. To his children's disbelief, Bruce quickly marries their next-door neighbor, a lonely cow inseminator. Claire drops out of college to devote herself to keeping her mother's memory alive back home, while Joshua becomes a drug dealer and a teenage father.
Exploring each character's distinct way of coping, Strayed shows her deep understanding of the emotional discord, desperation, and moments of levity, that accompany the grief of losing a loved one. She takes in the family with a compassionate but unsentimental gaze, and then grants them the gift of her largesse and earthy humor. Torch reveals both the beauty and the terror of learning how to keep living.
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