When Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector was published in 2002, the Los Angeles Times called his stories as close to faultless as any writer — young or vastly experienced — could wish for. He won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Discover Prize, Princeton's Hodder Fellowship, and two O. Henrys, and shared the Young Lions Award. Now he has written one of the most beautiful, wise, and compelling first novels of recent times.

David Winkler begins life in Anchorage, Alaska, a quiet boy drawn to the volatility of weather and obsessed with snow. Sometimes he sees things before they happen — a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant daughter will drown in a flood as he tries to save her, he comes undone. He travels thousands of miles, fleeing family, home, and the future itself, to deny the dream.

On a Caribbean island, destitute, alone, and unsure if his child has survived or his wife can forgive him, David is sheltered by a couple with a daughter of their own. Ultimately it is she who will pull him back into the world, to search for the people he left behind.

Doerr's characters are full of grief and longing, but also replete with grace. His compassion for human frailty is extraordinarily moving. In luminous prose, he writes about the power and beauty of nature and about the tiny miracles that transform our lives. About Grace is heartbreaking, radiant, and astonishingly accomplished.

"The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation — all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift. So why does so little seem to happen in this beautiful, ponderous and sometimes monotonous first novel by the author of the exquisite collection The Shell Collector? David Winkler has seen glimpses of the future ever since he was a boy. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, he dreams of his future wife; soon they meet, fall in love and run away to Ohio, where she gives birth to their daughter, Grace. But when he dreams that he fails to save Grace from a flood, Winkler abandons wife and child, hoping to flee the future. He becomes a hermetic handyman on a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, befriended by a local family. The years pass until, emboldened by his surrogate family's grown daughter, a gifted marine biologist, Winkler realizes that he must embark on a journey to discover if Grace is alive. This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story. Agent, Wendy Weil. 9-city author tour. (Oct.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"A compelling protagonist and a lyrical style grounded in precise observation of the physical world...[a] complex, ambitious first novel....A bold attempt...by a gifted writer whose own future looms promisingly indeed." Kirkus Reviews

"Doerr's characters pale in comparison with the natural world he so powerfully portrays around them." Seattle Times

"About Grace is a taut, gorgeously written odyssey of heartbreak and self-forgiveness. It is indeed about grace — what happens when we have found it yet manage to lose it — and about so much more: the power of love, the power of grief, and above all the power of dreams." Julia Glass, author of Three Junes

"About Grace is a stunning meditation on chance and pattern, exile and home. Gorgeous, transporting, and deeply, deeply satisfying. Equal parts science and magic (but all of it magical)." Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

"I loved this wonderful book — its strangeness, its obsessiveness, its beautiful sentences." Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane

"Like a gazetteer of a singular existence, About Grace is worldly — it takes place in Alaska, Ohio, the Caribbean — yet the story and its unusual hero, David Winkler, right away become fixed in a reader's attentions and stay there. About Grace is full of exacting dreams, marvelous incident, tragicomic underpinnings, and a dedication to the fundamental eccentricity of life. With the stories in The Shell Collector, we discovered a writer of immense talent; this novel gives us a sense that Mr. Doerr may become an indispensable one." Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and In Fond Remembrance of Me

"This mesmerizing novel is pitch perfect...utterly unforgettable." Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"One of those novels that works its way into your very dreams." Newsday

"A beautiful and expansive novel....As I neared the end, I read more and more slowly, increasingly reluctant to leave him and his intricately imagined world behind." Washington Post

"Doerr has a way of saying the ordinary in a way that makes you rethink the way the English language is used. The way he can take a paragraph to describe a sunset or fireworks in the sky without using one superfluous word is impressive. Not many writers can pull it off." Denver Post

"Doerr's beautiful writing carries the book." Rocky Mountain News

From an award-winning author whose first collection of stories was "as close to faultless as any writer — young or vastly experienced — could wish for" (Los Angeles Times) — comes an astonishingly beautiful, wise, and heartbreaking novel.

Anthony Doerr is the author of The Shell Collector, a collection of stories. He has received two O. Henry Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the prestigious Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. The Shell Collector won the 2002 Discover Prize for Fiction and the Ohioana Book Award, and Doerr shared the New York Public Library's 2003 Young Lions Award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Boise, Idaho.