Keith Maillard – författare

Hot Springs, Arkansasby Keith MaillardWorld War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author''s story, a tale about his family''s crumbling dynamics in troublesome times."''Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,'' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They''d never heard of Pearl Harbor."

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father's life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction—a social history often reading like a detective story—as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father's absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, and following a trail that takes him from Vancouver to Montreal to his native Wheeling, West Virginia, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.