Frances and Bernard - Carlene Bauer

Written by Carlene Bauer
Read by Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: February 5, 2013
Duration: 06:40:55

Bernard Elliot, a poet, and Frances Reardon, a fiction writer, meet at a writers’ colony during the summer of 1957 and begin a friendship and correspondence. Bernard, well born and Harvard-educated, is gregarious, reckless, and passionate; Frances, the precocious daughter of a middle-class Irish family, is circumspect, wry, and more than a little judgmental. What starts as an exploration of faith eventually becomes a romance, a development complicated by Bernard’s fall into manic depression and Frances’ struggle to decide whether she is strong enough to weather the illness with him for the long term.

The novel is anchored by two deeply imagined, fully inhabited characters who give voice to a love story that is as emotionally powerful as it is intellectually spirited.

“—-If this sounds like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, it should: Frances and Bernard are their fictionalized selves, with Frances the more fictional, since she’s neither Southern nor suffering from an incurable disease. Short but satisfying, this epistolary novel covers roughly nine years, as Frances and Bernard grow closer, at first through letters, then visits, always fending off questions from themselves and others about whether they could be more than friends..…. A lovely surprise.”—PW