Blind Side of the Heart » (Bargain)

Michael C. White is the author of four previous novels: A Brother's Blood, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers nominee, as well as nominated for an Edgar; The Blind Side of the Heart, an Alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection; and A Dream of Wolves, which received starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher's Weekly. The Garden of Martyrs (May 2004) was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in 2005, and he also has a collection of short stories, Marked Men. He has also published over 45 short stories in national magazines and journals, and has won the Advocate Newspapers Fiction Award and been nominated for both a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart. He was the founding editor of the yearly fiction anthology American Fiction. Currently he is the editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.

He teaches fiction writing workshops and literature courses at Fairfield University, and is on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine's low-residency MFA program. He lives on a lake in Connecticut with his dog Henry.
Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

From the author of the critically acclaimed novel A Brother's Blood, comes a haunting story about an Irish housekeeper who must discover the truth when her friend, the parish priest, is accused of horrible crimes.

Maggie Quinn has had her share of misfortune: Having grown up poor and fatherless in Galway, she was forced to quit school early and find work to support her ailing mother and her own child. But when a tragedy of her own making strikes, it is too much for her to bear. Plagued by feelings of guilt and sorrow and by losing her faith in God, she runs from her past; first by fleeing Ireland for America and later by drowning her sorrows with the bottle. Maggie hits rock bottom when she makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt.While recuperating in a hospital bed, she meets the remarkable Father Jack Devlin. With his compassion and love, Maggie once more finds her faith and a reason to live.

For the past eighteen years, Maggie has devoted herself to the man who saved her life. But now Father Jack, the beloved if controversial priest in the small town of Hebron Falls, Massachusetts, is accused of having done terrible things to altar boys many years before. At first Maggie is convinced that the accusations are only lies brought out by Father Jack's enemies. Yet as she sifts through the memories of her life with Father Jack, doubts begin to emerge: Could she have been blind to a darker side of her friend all these years? And when new information surfaces regarding the unsolved murder of a young altar boy with possible links to Father Jack, her faith is once again put to the test. Maggie must search her memory and her heart to help her decide what to believe. The Blind Side of the Heart poignantly captures one woman's struggle to remain loyal to a friend while at the same time she is forced to examine her conscience to arrive at the truth.

Publishers Weekly

White's detailed and engrossing second novel (after A Brother's Blood) follows class tensions, shame and loyalty among New England's Irish-American Catholics when a scandal shakes a small-town church. Eighteen years before the novel begins, Father John Thomas Devlin rescued White's appealing, ingenuous narrator, Irish immigrant Maggie "Ma" Quinn, from alcoholism, prostitution and destitution. Since then, she's worked as the loyal live-in housekeeper at the rectory of his church in western Massachusetts. Maggie is stunned and disbelieving when two adult brothers, Bobby and Russell Roby, allege that the upright, selfless, and hardworking priest molested them when they were boys, 15 years ago. As police and press descend on their community, gossip swirls around Maggie and Father Jack; townsfolk begin to ostracize them. Maggie, like the reader, gradually begins to doubt the priest she once trusted. After Father Jack is arrested and relieved of his duties, Maggie starts drinking heavily, and inadvertently gives damaging testimony at Father Jack's trial. When the priest accepts a plea bargain, Maggie considers his four-year sentence her fault. Then Father Jack is indicted again, for the long-unsolved murder of an altar boy. Though her judgment seems rock solid, Maggie's drinking undermines her credibility as a narrator. Yet her melancholy, singular voice is so strong, her faith in herself and in Father Jack so compelling, that readers will speed through the book in order to discover the truth. Agent, Nat Sobel. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.