And They Loved

At forty-five, Alice goes to Paris because she cannot finish a book. On a small street in the sixth arrondissement she walks into a bookshop she will never find again, and an old bookseller hands her a small dark-cloth volume and tells her, simply, "Read it slowly." The book is called And They Loved.

Back home in Jackson, Wyoming, Alice opens the book and discovers that its first chapter describes, in patient and unmistakable detail, the morning she is about to live. The green mug. The pencil mark in the manuscript margin. The walk to the coffee shop, where, on the second chapter, a man in a brown felt hat and worked-in boots will tip his hat to her on his way out the door.

What follows is a quiet, devastating love story told one chapter at a time - Alice's and the bookseller's, Alice's and her oldest friend Sam's, and above all Alice's and Alex's, a Wyoming rancher whose life she walks into and who walks into hers. But the book on her desk knows things she does not. It knows about a man from her past who is coming back. It knows about a child not yet born to her who will become her daughter. It knows what she will choose, and what she will lose, and what she will build out of the losing.

And They Loved is a novel about being read by your own life - and about saying yes to it anyway.