Mary and O’Neil frequently marveled at how, of all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they’d come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?
Justin Cronin’s poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O’Neil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and O’Neil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of O’Neil’s parents, Mary’s long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, O’Neil’s sister’s battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and O’Neil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.
Read an Excerpt
Last of the Leaves
November 1979
Arthur in darkness—drifting, drifting--the planet spinning toward dawn: he awakens in gray November daybreak to the sounds of running water and a great arm brushing the side of his house. The wind, he thinks, the wind; the end of autumn, the last of the leaves pulled away. The running water, he understands, was never real.
He lies in the dark of the bedroom he shares with his wife, waiting for the dream to fade—a dream in which, together, they sail over a cliff into blackness. What else? A sense of water below, a lake or stream, Miriam's hand in his, of everything loosed from the earth; a feeling like accomplishment, shapes fitting together with mathematical precision, all the equations of the heavens ringing. A dream of final happiness, in which they, Arthur and Miriam, together, at the last, die.
Arthur rises, takes a wool sweater from the chair by his bed, pushes his feet into the warm pockets of his slippers. He draws the sweater over his head, his twisted pajama top; he puts on his glasses and pauses, letting his eyes, cakey with sleep, adjust. In the feeble, trembling light (The moon? A streetlamp? The day...
Discussion Questions
1. The deaths of O’Neil’s parents, Miriam and Arthur, in the opening story, “Last of the Leaves,” haunt O’Neil throughout the rest of the book. When he and his sister, Kay, discover the credit card bill including the charge for the motel where Arthur and Miriam stopped on their fatal trip home, they are deeply disturbed, leading O’Neil to realize “how little he truly knew about his parents.” And O’Neil...
Praise
“An astonishingly good first novel...fully engaging from the first paragraph. What a gift: to be able to live alongside these people for a while.” —Ann Patchett, Chicago Tribune
“A literary love story...about the fragility of good fortune and the accidental ways of finding happiness.” —USA Today
“Justin Cronin must have been a novelist in an earlier life. What else could account for the mature insight and the beautifully controlled technique we find in his debut novel? ... Cronin succeeds, touchingly and tenderly, in portraying life itself as a triumph of hope over experience.” —The Boston Globe
“Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil is that rare thing: a wholly engrossing story of the ordinary life.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising
