Light on Snow is an intimate, quietly charged novel; a close-up portrait of a loving father and daughter, thrown together in their grief and separated by a gulf of unspoken emotions The simple, straightforward prose and the isolated snowbound setting increase the sense of forced intimacy. It’s a story that draws in the reader and fosters a strong sympathy for all involved.

What makes a family? That’s what twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon wonders after she and her widowed father discover a wailing abandoned baby in the snow-filled woods near their New Hampshire home. Through the days that follow, the Dillons and the unex-pected visitor who soon turns up at their door-a young woman evidently haunted by her own terrible choices--face a thicket of decisions, each seeming to carry equal possibilities of heartbreak or redemption. Writing with all the emotional resonance that has drawn millions of readers around the world to her fiction, Anita Shreve unfolds in Light on Snow a tender and surprising novel about love and its consequences.