A major literary voice spins a psychological terror tale in the mode of John Le Carre. Lowell, A Single Father, is haunted by the memory of a hijacked Paris-New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was a teenager. A stranger, Samantha, has recently begun harassing him with phone calls about information from declassified documents. She is obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64. "I was on that flight. I was six years old. I have right, " she says. "What can be worse than not knowing?" Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying new novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national complicities in the age of terrorism. She probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering and the painful meaning of survival.

Years ago, Lowell's mother was gunned down on a hijacked flight, and now a stranger who was on that flight as a child wants to chat. Big foreign sales and an eight-city author tour, too. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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In this literary thriller about international terrorism, a 1987 CIA-sponsored hijacking goes tragically wrong, leaving a profound mark both on those who survived and on the family members of those who didn't. Thirteen years after the hijacking of Air France 64, Lowell Hawthorne, whose mother perished on the flight, receives a call from survivor Samantha Raleigh, one of the children released by the hijackers before they blew up the plane. Samantha wants to talk about the tragedy, but Lowell is adept at avoiding his feelings and puts her off for months. Then his father, a former CIA official, dies under mysterious circumstances and leaves him a bag filled with journals and videotapes about the incident. Evading shadowy operatives intent on reclaiming the material, Samantha and Lowell finally get together and discover the truth about the hijacking, a truth more personal and painful than they could have ever imagined. Writing in the shadow of September 11, Hospital has crafted a novel of fiercely powerful emotions and deeply unsettling implications that is not so much a departure from her earlier works (e.g., Oyster; Dislocations) as an extension of their psychological probing. Recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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Hospital (Oyster) is a writer of many gifts; her dark imagination, astute insights into societal interactions and the supple beauty of her prose, provide an irresistible combination. This latest novel is an enthralling tale about the intertwined fates of the survivors and the relatives of those who perished on Flight 64, hijacked by terrorists in 1987. The dysfunctional life of Lowell Hawthorne, a divorced father of two children, is rooted in his mother's death on that flight when he was a teenager ("every year, as September approaches, he believes he has put it all behind him, he believes he has laid the ghosts, he believes he will feel nothing but a dull, almost pleasurable sort of pain, like a toothache. And then: shazam, he is a wreck again"). Hawthorne is also tormented by the fact that his estranged father, an intelligence agent, may have had some knowledge of the hijacking before it happened. When Hawthorne's father dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances and Hawthorne starts getting phone calls from Samantha, one of the 40 children who survived the fatal flight (they were released before the plane was blown up), Hawthorne is finally forced to confront his demons. Together, Hawthorne and Samantha go on a dangerous quest to discover the truth behind the disaster and to understand why there was an apparent government coverup in its aftermath. In intense, lyrical prose, Hospital introduces seemingly disparate characters and places and connects them through an elaborate and poignantly tragic plot, only disrupted by the distracting inclusion of overelaborate descriptions of terrorist tactics. In this age of global terrorism, Hospital's sophisticated psychological thriller offers a thought-provoking glimpse of the sociopolitical intricacies of the individuals and organizations that track terrorism, as well as of the enduring personal struggles of those left behind after an attack. (July) Forecast: Though Hospital is better known in Canada and Europe than in the U.S., this new book, with its timely theme, could be her breakthrough here, aided by an eight-city author tour. Foreign rights have already been sold in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and U.K.. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.