Description: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch, a spectacularly riveting novel based on a real-life crime by a con man who preyed on widows: "a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction" (Stephen King).
In Chicago in 1931, Asta Eicher, a lonely mother of three, is desperate for money after the sudden death of her husband. She begins to receive seductive letters from a chivalrous, elegant man named Harry Powers, who promises to cherish and protect her, ultimately to marry her and to care for her and her children. Weeks later, Asta and her three children are dead. Emily Thornhill, one of the few women journalists in the Chicago press, wants to understand what happened to this beautiful family, particularly to the youngest child, Annabel, an enchanting girl with a precocious imagination and sense of magic. Determined, Emily travels to West Virginia to cover the murder trial and to investigate the story herself, accompanied by a charming and unconventional photographer equally drawn to the case. These heroic characters, driven by secrets of their own, will stop at nothing to ensure Powers is convicted. A tragedy, a love story, and a tour de force of obsession, Jayne Anne Phillips's Quiet Dell "hauntingly imagines the victims' hopes, dreams, and terror" (O, The Oprah Magazine). It is a mesmerizing and deeply moving novel from one of America's most celebrated writers.Brief description: Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Night Watch, Lark and Termite, Motherkind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and the widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets. A National Book Award and National Book Critic's Circle Award finalist, Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, where she established The Writers At Newark Reading Series. Information, essays and text source photographs on her fiction can be viewed at JayneAnnePhillips.com.
Review Quotes: "Phillips' extensive reporting--she quotes from newspaper stories, letters between Eicher and her 'suitor' and the trial transcript--gives the book its considerable heft. And her creation of a Chicago reporter named Emily Thornhill helps to frame the story of the eight-decade-old event in a fresh way. Quiet Dell is a smart combination of true crime, history and fiction tied together with Phillips' seamlessly elegant writing....As the book proceeds to its dark conclusion, Emily offers readers a glimpse of light."--Amy Driscoll "Miami Herald"