Vinegar Hill
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Read This and Tell Me What It Says
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In her first full-length story collection, author A. Manette Ansay explores the rural Midwest landscape and the people who inhabit it: ordinary folk with extraordinary inner lives, struggling to make sense of the isolated, sometimes painful, and often intensely religious worlds in which they live. Her are 15 haunting and exquisitely written tales that offer a rare and unforgettable glimpse into the complexities of being human and being alive.
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Sister
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In her remarkable second novel, A. Manette Ansay tells the story of Abigail Schiller, a girl who lives a seemingly normal childhood in a small Catholic community in Wisconsin. But that life is shattered when her younger brother Sam, unable to live up to his father’s rigid ideas of masculinity, mysteriously vanishes at the age of seventeen. Haunted by both Sam’s disappearance and memories of violence that her mother denies, Abby finds herself increasingly unable to reconcile her own life with the wishes of her family and the Catholic Church. Now thirty years old and expecting her first child, Abby realizes the past she tried to run from holds the key to her own future and to that of her child. She embarks on an emotional journey that retraces her brother’s descent into feelings of worthlessness and a world of drug abuse, a journey that contradicts everything she once believed about her family and herself. Sister is the poignant story of a woman’s search for memory and meaning, the reconciliation of present and past within the complicated fabric of family. With grace and compassion, A. Manette Ansay spins hard-won triumph out of tragedy, testifying to the indelibility of the human spirit.
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River Angel
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In April, 1991, in a little Wisconsin town about 100 miles southwest of the town where I grew up, a misfit boy was kidnapped by a group of high school kids who, later would testify they only meant to frighten him, to drive him around for a while. Somehow they ended up in the river whooping and hollering on a two lane bridge. Somehow, the boy was shoved, he jumped, he slipped — accounts vary — into the icy water. The kids told police they never heard a splash; one reported seeing a brilliant flash of light. (Several people in the area witnessed a similar light, while others recalled hearing something “kind of like thunder.”) All night, volunteers walked the rivers edge, but it was dawn before the body was found in a barn a good mile from the bridge. The owner of the barn had been the one to discover the body and she said the boys’ cheeks were rosy, his skin warm to the touch. A sweet smell hung in the air. “It was,” she said, “as if he were just sleeping” And then she told police she believed an angel had carried him there. A miracle? A hoax? Or something in between? With acute insight and great compassion, A. Manette Ansay captures the inner life of a town and its residents struggling to forge a new identity in the face of a rapidly changing world. The result is a novel of transcendental beauty, an extraordinary portrait of the human soul’s longing for grace.
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Midnight Champagne
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April Liesgang and Caleb Shannon have known each other for just three short months, so their Valentine’s Day wedding at a chapel near the shores of Lake Michigan has both families in an uproar. As the festivities unfold (and the cash bar opens), everyone has an opinion and a lively prediction about April and Caleb’s union, each the reflection of a different marital experience.
Meanwhile, at the nearby Hideaway Lodge, a domestic quarrel ends in tragedy. As April and Caleb’s life together begins, death parts another man and woman in angry violence—and as the two stories gradually intersect, their juxtaposition explores the tangled roots of vulnerability and desire.
By the time the last polka has been danced and the bouquet tossed, Midnight Champagne has cast an extraordinary spell. From the novel’s opening epigraph from Chekhov—”If you fear loneliness, then marriage is not for you”—to its final moments in the honeymoon suite, A. Manette Ansay weaves tenderness and fury, passion and wonder into a startling tapestry of love in all its paradox and power.
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Limbo
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From childhood, acclaimed novelist A. Manette Ansay trained to become a concert pianist. But at nineteen, a mysterious muscle disorder forced her to give up the piano, and by twenty-one, she couldn’t grip a pen or walk across a room. She entered a world of limbo, one in which no one could explain what was happening to her or predict what the future would hold. At twenty-three, beginning a whole new life in a motorized wheelchair, Ansay made a New Year’s resolution to start writing fiction, rediscovering the sense of passion and purpose she thought she had lost for good. “Writing fiction began for me as a side effect of illness, a way to live beyond my body when it became clear that this new, altered body would be mine to keep. A way to fill the hours that had once been occupied by music. A way to achieve the kind of closure that, once, I’d found in prayer. Limbo takes its title from the Catholic belief in a place between heaven and hell that is neither, one that Ansay imagines as “a gray room without walls, a gray floor, a gray bench . . . .You wouldn’t know how long you’d been in that room, or how much longer you had to go.” Thirteen years and five books later, still without a firm diagnosis or prognosis, Ansay reflects on the ways in which the unraveling of one life can plant the seeds of another, and considers how her own physical limbo has challenged — in ways not necessarily bad — her most fundamental assumptions about life and faith. Luminously written, Limbo is a brilliant and moving testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.
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Blue Water
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New York Times bestselling author A. Manette Ansay delivers the unforgettable story of two families united by tragedy — and one woman’s deeply emotional journey toward a choice she’d never thought possible On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn’s lives are irrevocably changed when a drunk driver slams into Meg’s car, killing the couple’s six-year-old son, Evan. In a town in which everyone knows everybody else, it’s no surprise that Meg and the driver, Cindy Ann Kreisler, were once the best of friends. Now, as Meg recovers from her own injuries, she and Rex find themselves unable to cope with their anger and despair, especially after Cindy Ann returns — with a mere slap on the wrist — to the life she lived before the accident: living in a beautiful house, enjoying her own three daughters, all of whom walked away from the accident unharmed. Mornings, we woke with an ache in our throats, a sourness in our stomachs, that had nothing to do with Evan. The truth was that, with each passing month, he was harder to remember, harder to see. I felt as if I were grasping at the color of water, the color of the wind or the sky. And this only made me angrier. My mind returned, again and again, to Cindy Ann, to what she’d done. When I passed Evan’s room, the closed door like a fist, I thought about how Cindy Ann had destroyed us. When I saw other people’s children, I promised myself that someday, Cindy Ann would pay. In their rage and grief, Meg and Rex buy a boat to sail around the world, hoping to put as much distance between themselves and Cindy Ann Kreisler as possible. Adrift in the company of other live-board cruisers, Meg tries to believe that she and Rex have left their bitterness behind. But when she returns to Fox Harbor for her older brother’s wedding, she is forced to face the complex ties that bind her to the woman who has wounded her so badly. For, as Meg knows better than anyone, Cindy Ann has secrets and sorrows of her own, dating back to the summer of their friendship. Impassioned, insightful, and beautifully written, Blue Water is the story of people learning to face the unthinkable — a compelling affirmation of the human potential for forgiveness, redemption, and grace.
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Good Things I Wish You
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“A lyrical, haunting exploration of loves past and present. Witty, sprightly, surprising, this deeply original and utterly captivating new novel … beguiles the senses and dazzles the heart. A beautiful book.” –Diana Abu-Jaber “As the parallels between the two relationships multiply, the novel catches fire. . . . Ansay is a gifted and sure-handed storyteller.” –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel From the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Vinegar Hill and Midnight Champagne comes a beautifully written story of two summer romances–one of a brilliant pianist, one of a struggling novelist–separated in time by nearly two centuries. If you enjoy the novels of Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), Claire Messud (The Emperor’s Children), and Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin), you’ll find much to love in A. Manette Ansay’s stunningly original Good Things I Wish You.
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A. Manette Ansay 