The Looking Glass; A Novel

by Richard Paul Evans

• ISBN13: 9780684867816
• ISBN10: 0684867818
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-28
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

When I started to write The Looking Glass, I intended to create a story about the healing power of hope and love. But as this story developed, a message began to emerge that I had not foreseen, a message about the distorted mirror in which we vi

Author Biography

Richard Paul Evans is the bestselling author of the Christmas Box trilogy and The Locket, as well as the children's books The Dance and The Christmas Candle, which received the 1998 American Mothers' Book Award. There are currently more than ten million copies of his books in print. All proceeds from Evans's books for children go to the Christmas Box House International, an organization that he founded, dedicated to building shelters and providing services for abused children. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their five children. He is currently working on his next novel.

Please send correspondence to Richard Paul Evans at: P.O. Box 1416 Salt Lake City, UT 84110

or visit his Web site at: http://www.richardpaulevans.com

Richard Paul Evans is a nationally acclaimed speaker. To request Mr. Evans for speaking engagements, please fax your request to [phone] or contact the above address or Web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue
One: Quaye
Two: Hunter Bell
Three: Isabel
Four: Samson and Delilah
Five: Flight
Six: The Wax Woman
Seven: The House of God
Eight: Eureka
Nine: The Great Salt Lake City
Ten: Sonny Chang
Eleven: Quaye?s Arrival
Twelve: Jak Morse
Thirteen: The Woman in the Snow
Fourteen: The Stranger
Fifteen: The Preacher?s Soul
Sixteen: Syau Lou
Seventeen: The Abduction
Eighteen: The Inscription
Nineteen: The Burial
Twenty: The Funeral
Twenty-one: A Glass Darkly
Twenty-two: Hunter?s Absence
Twenty-three: The Looking Glass
Twenty-four: Broken Glass
Twenty-five: News
Twenty-six: Three of a Kind
Twenty-seven: Quaye?s Choice
Twenty-eight: The Lynching
Twenty-nine: Farewell
Thirty: The Redemption
Epilogue

Excerpts

Chapter One: Quaye There's no love left on earthand God is dead in heavenIn the dark and deadly days of Black '47.-- Irish folk song It's easy to halve the potato where there's love.-- Irish proverb Cork, Ireland, 1847Connall McGandley trudged wearily across the haze-shrouded countryside, his arms crossed at his chest, his pace pressed against the receding twilight. The chill air smelled sweetly of a distant peat fire and he willed himself to not think of its warmth. Dusk brought a bite to the fog and he had pawned his coat in the last town for the paltry measure of maize he carried in the sack flung across his shoulder. He had walked hungry since dawn with hope of securing relief for his family. There was no labor for hire and his coat had fetched only a couple handfuls of Indian corn from a shopkeeper who chased him out of his store after the transaction. He had encountered few on his journey, just the quiet, deserted bogs and abandoned hovels of a dying nation. The music of Ireland, the land of song, was silenced by famine and the only strains now that filled the air were the occasional piercing wails for the dead -- the keening of the banshee.To the side of the road, behind one of the heaped limestone walls that serpentined across the countryside, a woman crawled on hands and knees through a dank bog, gleaning what had been missed in the last picking, chewing anything that was edible: raw turnips, nettles, and charlock. He turned away. The scene was all too familiar -- men and women in the final throes of starvation, their mouths stained green from the grass they ate in a vain attempt to survive. It no longer held curiosity. It no longer held even emotion. It was just the way it was. It would not be long before his own family would be evicted from their hovel, to burn with the fever and madness of starvation or die of exposure. His only son already lay hot with typhus.It had been two autumns since the mist rose from the sea to cloak Ireland. When the fog lifted, the first signs of the distemper appeared, the stalks bent in the fields, a harbinger of a nation's fate. The blight hit in full the following year, destroying nearly the whole of the island's potato crop. The potato was everything to the Irish poor and the Celts could make anything from the tuber, from candy to beer. The potato was as much heritage as subsistence, but even in the best of times, the potato culture was a precarious existence.It was shortly before the last harvest when McGandley first discovered the blight on his own meager crop of lumpers -- the first lesions on the curling leaves, bruiselike markings that had dropped him to his knees in fervent prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate circumstance. The family immediately harvested, pared off the diseased portions of the crop, and ate or sold what they could, feeding what they couldn't to the pigs. Then they devoured the pigs themselves. But even the swines' bones which they had boiled, reboiled, then gnawed in hunger, were now gone, replaced only with desperation.Fifty steps ahead, emerging from the screen of fog, a wooden horse-drawn cart was mired in the mud to the side of the road. A squat, dun-haired man stood calf deep in the mud in front of the horse, pulling at its lines and cursing the animal. It was a curious sight, more so as most farm animals had already been slaughtered for meat. The man saw McGandley and raised a hand to him."You, there." The expulsion appeared before him in the frigid air.As McGandley neared, the man grimaced at McGandley's appearance, surmising him a madman. He had encountered many on the day's travel -- men and women, often naked, lunatic with hunger."Have ye anything to eat?" McGandley called.The man frowned. "Not outside my belly." He motioned to the cart. "Can ya lend a hand?""If yer wanting to get somewhere, man, ye b