In Sunlight and in Shadow (Library Edition)

Product Description [Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.] Mark Helprin's enchanting and sweeping novel asks a simple question: can love and honor conquer all? New York in 1947 glows with postwar energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, returns home to run the family business. In a single, magical encounter on the Staten Island ferry, the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale falls for him instantly, but too late to prevent her engagement to a much older man. Harry and Catherine pursue one another in a romance played out in postwar America's Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine's choice of Harry over her longtime fiancé endangers Harry's livelihood -- and eventually threatens his life. Entrancing in its lyricism,In Sunlight and in Shadow so powerfully draws you into New York at the dawn of the modern age that, as in a vivid dream, you will not want to leave. Review In Sunlight and in Shadow takes a huge bite out of one very complex Apple, blending aspects of its art and commerce into a story that pulses not just with romance but also with an energy befitting America's most vibrant city. Helprin is a master of his material. -- "Seattle Times "[A] beautifully read story, full of romance, philosophical musings, and poetic passages...Sean Runnette's reading of Harry suited the thoughtful, strong, smart and sexy Harry. Helprin's text with Runnette's narration of the time and location of post-war New York City is eloquent and listeners will be entranced.-- "Soundcommentary.com"Elegant, elegiac...A fine adult love story-not in the prurient sense, but in the sense of lovers elevated from smittenness to all the grownup problems that a relationship can bring.-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Glorious and golden, truly like reentering another world where another sensibility prevails and even the sunlight and shadow have a different weight.-- "Library Journal"Helprin has written another expansive novel, as if no one has yet alerted him that the novel is dead. Here it is, a poetic and likely enduring rendering of New York just after the Second World War, a love story that pines for love but even more fervently for an industrious and ascendant America that is no more and maybe never was...In Sunlight and In Shadow matters. It is a novel, with all of the presumption and ambition and sense of transport that that word once carried when it was the boss...If his latest novel is a book out of time, perhaps it holds clues as to where the novel ought to go from here.-- "Esquire "Helprin is gifted at writing about war-not just combat but the vastly complex and contradictory world that surrounds combat-and the passages describing Harry's wartime experiences are...lyrical, thrilling, and at times astonishing...In Sunlight and in Shadow, like all of Helprin's novels, exists to remind us that...it is sometimes wiser and more fulfilling to cherish our deepest ideals than to mock them. -- "Chicago Tribune "Helprin is the closest thing modern culture has to such esteemed figures as John Keats and Walter Pater-he evinces a type of Romantic Aestheticism that is a dying breed in this barbarous age...Though Modernists and Post-Modernists have undoubtedly dominated the twentieth century, and the beginning of the twenty-first century, I do foresee the pendulum swing back...[with] Mark Helprin as a leading figure of the twenty-first-century Renaissance. -- "Huffington Post "Helprin paints a dazzling portrait of the city...and evokes the universal, dizzy delight of falling head over heels in love...Wise, saturated with sensory detail, and beautifully written, Sunlight celebrates the unquenchable bliss of existence. -- "People "In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing, and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, the new novel is a spiritu