Anita Shreve - The Weight of Water: A Novel Tag - Author of Resistance and Strange Fits of Passion

Copyright 1997 by Anita Shreve

Reading group guide copyright 2004 by Anita Shreve and Little, Brown and Company

Excerpt from Testimony copyright 2008 by Anita Shreve

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

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Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 1997

First eBook edition: January 1998

Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

ISBN 978-0-316-07351-6

Contents

PRAISE FOR A NITA S HREVES
The Weight of Water

Mesmerizing quietly spellbinding. A kind of mystery forged of romance and danger. Part of the books power is of the conventional whodunit variety. Equally strong is Shreves evocative prose style. The Weight of Water is well-crafted entertainment that also plumbs the depths.

Dan Cryer, Newsday

Spellbinding. Shreves triumph here is in creating a pace that brilliantly mimics the frenzy of one who acts in a moment of searing passion.

Leah Odze Epstein, Nashville BookPage

Its impossible not to keep turning the pages, as Shreve, with somber voice, leads us on.

Susan Dooley, Washington Post Book World

Riveting haunting. Shreve is equally adroit at spinning a yarn and etching fine prose.

Kate Callen, San Diego Union-Tribune

Powerful. This taut thriller is based on the true story of the murder of two women on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire in 1873. Shreve has fashioned together two memorable dramas into a single narrative that explores jealousy, trust, and betrayal.

Barbara James Thomson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Spare, tightly plotted, and compactly written a novel powerfully driven by plot and language. Shreve displays an intriguing range of style and tone. It is as if an Ibsen drama had erupted in an Ann Beattie novel.

Maureen McLane, Chicago Tribune

Both stories move slowly and surely through the dark and distorting medium of water toward tragedy. Both stories feel primitive in their passions, as if the characters were bereft of language and necessarily reliant on gaze, gesture, and touch. This is a powerful achievement.

Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

Absorbing and suspenseful. The writing is controlled and evocative, the novel mysterious and disturbing.

Orlando Sentinel

Gripping. The speed with which lives unravel is at the heart of both strands of Shreves stunning tale. There is plenty for the reader to ponder and savor in this accomplished inquiry into the ravages of love.

Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times

Shreve manages to surprise her imagination never fails her. The Weight of Water accrues power through its sharply described detail and carefully controlled language. It is impossible not to admire Shreves considerable craft.

Jocelyn McClurg, Hartford Courant

An engrossing tale. A cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above. Ms. Shreve unravels themes of adultery, jealousy, crimes of passion, incest, negligence, and loss ultimately creating a nearly intolerable tension. A haunting novel.

Susan Kenney, New York Times Book Review

Taut and chilling. Told in exquisitely moving prose. The sense Shreve conveys of lifes inexorability is perfectly on target.

Polly Paddock, Charlotte Observer

Its a literary voyage you dont want to miss. A stunningly realized portrait of loves darker aspects. Shreves plot line is a powerful current, the writing equally strong.

Amy Waldman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Shreve manages to keep the readers interest at a fever pitch. A haunting and disturbing tale.

Karen Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press

Shreves writing is spare, poetic, and completely captivating.

Rae Francoeur, North Shore Magazine

Enthralling. The Weight of Water sheds light as raw as that which floods the Isles of Shoals in the dark of winter. Shreve has written the most moving book of her career so far.

Rebecca Radner, San Francisco Chronicle

For my mother and my daughter

D URING THE NIGHT of March 5, 1873, two women, Norwegian immigrants, were murdered on the Isles of Shoals, a group of islands ten miles off the New Hampshire coast. A third woman survived, hiding in a sea cave until dawn.

The passages of court testimony included in this work are taken verbatim from the transcript of The State of Maine v. Louis H.F. Wagner.

Apart from recorded historical fact, the names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this work are either the products of the authors imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

The matter of who killed Anethe and Karen Christensen was settled in a court of law, but has continued to be debated for more than a century.

I HAVE TO let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight.

I sit in the harbor and look across to smuttynose. A pink light, a stain, makes its way across the island. I cut the engine of the small boat I have rented and put my fingers into the water, letting the shock of the cold swallow my hand. I move my hand through the seawater, and think how the ocean, this harbor, is a repository of secrets, its own elegy.

I was here before. A year ago. I took photographs of the island, of vegetation that had dug in against the weather: black sedge and bayberry and sheep sorrel and sea blite. The island is not barren, but it is sere and bleak. It is granite, and everywhere there are ragged reefs that cut. To have lived on Smuttynose would have required a particular tenacity, and I imagine the people then as dug in against the elements, their roots set into the cracks of the rocks like the plants that still survive.

The house in which the two women were murdered burned in 1885, but when I was here a year ago, I photographed the footprint of the house, the marked perimeter. I got into a boat and took pictures of the whitened ledges of Smuttynose and the black-backed gulls that swept and rose above the island in search of fish only they could see. When I was here before, there were yellow roses and blackberries.

When I was here before, something awful was being assembled, but I didnt know it then.

I take my hand from the water and let the drops fall upon the papers in the carton, dampened already at the edges from the slosh. The pink light turns to violet.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

I T IS MY job to call out if I see a shape, a rocky ledge, an island. I stand at the bow and stare into the fog. Peering intently, I begin to see things that arent really there. First tiny moving lights, then minutely subtle gradations of gray. Was that a shadow? Was that a shape? And then, so shockingly that for a few important seconds I cannot even speak, it is all there: Appledore and Londoners and Star and Smuttynose rocks emerging from the mist. Smuttynose, all of a piece, flat with bleached ledges, forbidding, silent.