Windfalls

A POWERFUL NOVEL FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF INTO THE FOREST

Powerfully imagined and beautifully written

A powerful, extremely moving tale about motherhood, the choices we make, and the impact we can have on one another. Highly recommended

Jean Hegland was born in Washington State, but now lives near Healdsburg, California on 55 acres of second-growth forest with her husband and three children. As well as raising and home-schooling her children she teaches English and Creative Writing at Santa Rosa Junior College. Her highly-praised first novel, Into The Forest, was published in 1998.

It is the 1970s, and in a small town in Indiana, Anna, a young art student, works alone in her darkroom, mesmerised by the images emerging before her. Photography is her passion, her obsession, until one terrible miscalculation -Thousands of miles away in California, Cerise, a lonely teenager, battles with puberty. As her body betrays her, growing hair and sprouting breasts, which attract attention, she seeks comfort in the most desperate and risky of ways - Facing the same dilemma, Anna and Cerise make different choices. Choices which shape their lives forever and, many years later, bring them together - both now mothers, bound by a common bond. And when their lives intersect each woman emerges stronger, inspired by what she sees in the other, changed by what she learns. Utterly engrossing and profoundly moving, Windfalls explores the very essence and complexity of womanhood, and what it is to be a mother.

Jean Hegland

Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home. 
 
Nell and Eva live alone in the forest. Recently orphaned and completely isolated, they struggle for normality in a post-holocaust world where electricity is a thing of the past and the outside world a distant memory. In one short year, thie normal teenage lives have been transformed as everything we consider necessary to civilization crumbles. Without petrol or electricity they are forced into seclusion, and adolescent dreams of ballet school and Harvard are displaced by the reality of learning to survive. 
 
Nell and Eva wait for the power to come back and the world they understand to return, but as time goes on they are forced to realize that 'civilization' is perhaps nothing more than a temporary condition, a 'fugue state' the world has allowed us. At once a poignant and lyrical portrayal of the power of sisterly loyalty and a horrifying cautionary tale about the future of man and his place in the world, INTO THE FOREST is a deeply moving account of human nature and our fragile existence on earth.

Jean Hegland

Books by Jean Hegland

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