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  • Published: 31 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446448250
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

The Probable Future




'Alice Hoffman is simply brilliant' Daily Mail

When the women in the Sparrow family reach thirteen, they develop a unique ability. In young Stella's case, the gift, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the ability to see a person's probable future. Stella foresees a gruesome murder, and tells her charming, feckless father about it, but it is too late - the murder has already been committed and suspicion falls on him.

Hoffman unlocks the caskets of family life and the secret history of a community in this magical story about young love and old love, about making choices - usually the wrong ones - about foresight and consequences, all suffused with the haunting scent of roses and wisteria, and the hum of bees on a summer evening.

  • Published: 31 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446448250
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

About the author

Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic, The World That We Knew, the Reese’s Book Club selection The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, The Dovekeepers, and The Invisible Hour. She lives near Boston.

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Praise for The Probable Future

A great atmospheric storyteller... Her books are a real pleasure

Kate Atkinson

A reader is in good hands with Alice Hoffman... She is one of our quirkiest and most interesting novelists

Jane Smiley

Alice Hoffman hits bulls-eyes on the incomprehension between the young and the old, on the magic and pain of ordinary life. She is erotic and romantic, funny and clever and humane

The Times

Alice Hoffman is a daring and able writer; she plots conjunctions of mundane and magical events with such ease that the reader never doubts her word

New Yorker

An enchanting page-turner of a novel... Charming, utterly absorbing and very enjoyable, this book will leave you wanting move

Big Issue

Daringly mixing comedy with tragedy, and the quotidian with the fabulous, she has created a narrative that somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage... Hoffman writes so simply about human passions that her characters are branded onto one's memory

New York Times

Gently gets under your skin. You'll be hooked

Daily Mirror

Like her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute yet tender eye for detail... Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity

The Times

Magical and engaging

Eve

Magical and entertaining; at times positively bewitching... That Hoffman is a highly capable storyteller is in no doubt. Hoffman's latest novel possesses the irresistible quality of a compelling fairytale for adults

Scotland on Sunday