His seventh novel, I'll Take You There, revives characters from Wishin' and Hopin' and considers themes of millennial-era popular culture contrasted with figures from the silent film era and the 1950s Miss Rheingold contest. (AP) A former Connecticut prison inmate has filed a lawsuit alleging she hasn’t been paid for her contribution to a new book by author Wally Lamb and accusing Lamb of harassing and intimidating her when she sought compensation. The novel focuses on art, 1950s-era racial strife, and the impact of a devastating flood on a Connecticut family. In We Are Water, Lamb returns to his familiar setting of Three Rivers. Published the following year, Wishin' and Hopin' was a departure for Lamb: a short, comically nostalgic novel about a parochial school fifth grader, set in 1964.
Lamb's third novel, The Hour I First Believed, published in 2008, interfaces fiction with such non-fictional events as the Columbine High School shooting, the Iraq War, and, in a story within the story, events of nineteenth-century America. Both novels became number one bestsellers after Oprah Winfrey selected them for her popular Book Club. His first novel, She's Come Undone, was followed six years later by I Know This Much Is True, a story about identical twin brothers, one of whom develops paranoid schizophrenia. "Astronauts," published in The Missouri Review in 1989, won the Missouri Review William Peden Prize and became widely anthologized. Lamb's first published stories were short fictions that appeared in Northeast, a Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant. His first novel She's Come Undone received rave reviews when it was published in 1992. 26, 2019, that he was barred Read More FILE In this file photo, author Wally Lamb speaks at Book Expo America in New York. Unimaginable secrets emerge long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.Lamb began writing in 1981, the year he became a father. Wally Lamb is the author of the New York Times and national bestseller The Hour I First Believed, as well as the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both 1 New York Times bestsellers and Oprah's Book Club selections.
Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum’s own troubled childhood.
While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family’s house. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character. In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. One critic called Wally Lamb a modern-day Dostoevsky, whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a mocking, sadistic God in whom they don’t believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times). Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Only there’s two sides to every story, you know. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it. Wally Lamb’s two previous novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers.