Tornado Alley

Tornado Alley is a story of a man and a woman who are on a dangerous collision course. Marie Boule is a love-starved young woman who grew up in a small, impoverished town in Pennsylvania, and her one desire is to find a comfortable, easy life. She thinks she is capable of hardening her heart and making any sacrifice necessary to get where shes going. It is only a matter of time before she meets Ben Lunn, a bright and responsible man who thinks he has made his peace with the woman he has married and the demands of being a father and husband. When Ben and Marie meet it is with all the unstoppable quality of a force of nature: at first, they are just pleased with each others company, a kind of innocent companionship they both crave, but soon they enter into a secret bond. Benn Lunns life has been marked by gifts, not the least of which is a kind of magical sense about the world. He is the son of a small-town doctor, and in the heat of the place where he grew up, in the scandals of those around him, there is always the constant presence of the effect of passion. His mother ran off to become an actress… his father keeps his own love alive, waiting for her return. Marie has seen, in her own youth, the result of love come to nothing, and she is determined to avoid this at all costs…Tornado Alley is a compelling novel about love and loss, honor and passion, and the mysteries of the human heart. It is told with drama and humor, and its characters are real people dealing with the recognizable problems of life. The LA Times wrote, Nova delivers a prose that is…lyrical, subtle, almost poetic, a prose that makes his characters' emotional lives palpable, a prose that makes a sad story pleasurable to read. And, author John Irving said, In novel after novel, Nova made the most unlikely characters sympathetic and, especially lately, hes often put them on a collision course. Maybe this first and most forcefully got my attention in Tornado Alley but it continues …