Midnight Champagne »

A. Manette Ansay s first novel, Vinegar Hill, established the writer as a novelist who could tell a difficult story with great grace. Ansay s honest, moving fiction is infused with the reality of Midwestern farm life, the constraints of Roman Catholicism, and the toll the combination can take on women and men alike.

April Liesgang and Caleb Shannon have known each other for just three short months, so their Valentine's Day wedding at a chapel near the shores of Lake Michigan has both families in an uproar. As the festivities unfold (and the cash bar opens), everyone has an opinion and a lively prediction about April and Caleb's union, each the reflection of a different marital experience.

Meanwhile, at the nearby Hideaway Lodge, a domestic quarrel ends in tragedy. As April and Caleb's life together begins, death parts another man and woman in angry violence—and as the two stories gradually intersect, their juxtaposition explores the tangled roots of vulnerability and desire.

By the time the last polka has been danced and the bouquet tossed, Midnight Champagne has cast an extraordinary spell. From the novel's opening epigraph from Chekhov—"If you fear loneliness, then marriage is not for you"—to its final moments in the honeymoon suite, A. Manette Ansay weaves tenderness and fury, passion and wonder into a startling tapestry of love in all its paradox and power.

The New York Times Book Review \ - Laura Jamison

What is it about a wedding that inspires such bad behavior among those who attend it? The nuptial celebration at the center of Midnight Champagne, a funny, touching novel...[is] a loud, rude comment on their own thwarted romantic lives....The lady in red isn't the only one at this wedding who has soured on a relationship, but that doesn't stop the revelers from risking disappointment, loss of self-respect and...a shot at lasting, magical love.