'All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well' is the story of Burt Hecker, a sixty-three-year-old medieval re-enactor and his doomed attempts at coming to terms with his own history.
In the company and care of a group of female, middle-aged, medieval chant enthusiasts, Burt leaves America to attend the nine-hundredth-birthday celebrations of Hildegard von Bingen in Germany. He has sold all of his possessions. His ticket to Europe is one way. Worse: Burt is bent on rescuing his beloved son, Tristan, from the "evil" city of Prague. If only he knew that his son doesn't want to be rescued, or found.
Drinking too much home-made mead and often wearing little more than a tunic, Burt catapults himself across Europe and back in time, as he revisits his treasured wife, Kitty, the history of their strange and beautiful relationship, the two children they did their best not to completely mess up, and the Old European mother-in-law who refused to die and nearly ruined everything with her own version of historical re-enactment.
'All Shall Be Well' ... is a novel about the different ways in which we perceive the past and how none of them, ultimately, can help us make sense of the present.
