Reunion (Hardcover)

At fifty-two, Charles is a professor at a minor ‘leafy little college’, a once promising poet, divorced, admiring of passion but without passion himself.  Out of impulse, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion — and there magically witnesses a replay of his last year in college.

Thirty years ago, Charles, then a romantic and tender twenty-two year-old, had fallen obsessively in love with a beautiful dancer.  Drawn back into his past like a moth to a flame, he recalls his love affair played out amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s.  Struggling with memories that often appear contradictory, Charles confronts once again the series of devastating events that forever changed his life.

Click here to read the first chapter.

‘Alan Lightman is not only a highly accomplished novelist; he has a doctorate in theoretical physics, and has published research papers in physics and astronomy as well as works of popular science. He teaches writing at MIT, and evidently cares profoundly about his craft ... this is a lyrical, highly idealistic evocation of the ecstasies of first love; with relief provided by the creeping shadow of time's revenges - suspicions, vulnerabilities, quarrels, complications ... a genuinely affecting picture of loss’ — Daily Telegraph

'The book is a model of tragi-comic self-deflation. Charles lives in a comfortable house — but only thanks to the fact that it has been bequeathed to him by his first wife. Charles is a poet, though a failed one. The poet of greater importance in the book is the man who taught Charles during his college years — and then had an affair with that same dancer from New York, the one who disappeared. He, too, may have been the father of that unborn child — which may or may not have been aborted. His life is therefore poisoned by the memory of a love affair that went wrong, and by self-destructive speculations about a child whom he may or may not have fathered, and who may or may not still exist. Charles, though passionate about his memories, is curiously passionless himself. He is a hesitant man, at the mercy of events. In Lightman's works of fiction, human beings are toys, ever subject to the unpredictable buffetings of fate and circumstance. Time never moves in a straight line towards a comfortable conclusion. If the future doesn't get you, you can be sure that the past will’ — Financial Times

'Remembered passion jolting the future is a literary commonplace but, unusually, Lightman presents memory as a treacherous force in control of the rememberer ... he is an undeniably talented writer’ — Guardian - in full