Holden Garfield is a foreign correspondent, burnt out before he's thirty, who comes back to Virginia to try to forget his experiences of war abroad and to try to find new hope in his life. What he finds instead is a woman who is desperate for his help. Through a chance phone call, Holden learns that his mentor's sister, Melanie, is hospitalised in Richmond with hysterical amnesia after her husband and sons were killed in a freak act of nature. Holden sets out to reconstruct her past, and almost at once the two embark on a passionate love affair - one fighting to remember, the other yearning to forget.
Memory. Passion. Loss. The ravages of extreme forces of nature . . . these are the themes Marianne Wiggins weaves through 'Almost Heaven'. 'Almost Heaven' is a love story but also a personal love letter to the American south.
