Once in Every Life » (Reprint)

Kristin Hannah is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels. She lives on islands in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii with her husband and son.

Tess Gregory's brilliant career as a research scientist hides her longings for husband and child. Though deaf, she is a free spirit — a woman full of life and love. She is struck down all too soon.
But for Tess, a new life begins at her death, in post-Civil War America. She is now Amarylis Rafferty, wife and mother of three — and she can hear. Shocked and disoriented by her new surroundings, she is drawn into the savage heartache burdening the family, especially her husband, Jack, a man who fears himself capable of anything.

Publishers Weekly

Tess Gregory is a successful research scientist with a poignant past when her deafness keeps her from hearing and avoiding an oncoming bus. Because her life has been so unsatisfactory and truncated, she is given a chance at a new one. A guardian angel escorts Tess to the ``theater of second chances,'' where her options consist of choosing among several different men to accompany in her next go-round. What she fails to understand is that the appealing man and newborn baby on whom she settles are living in the year 1873. On the positive side, Tess has been reincarnated in the body of a drop-dead gorgeous new mother complete with curly blond hair and perfect hearing. As for the down side, the woman whose body she now inhabits has been unspeakably cruel to her husband and daughters, so that they are afraid of her. Before her situation is resolved she uses her modern psychiatric knowledge to help a dyslexic daughter learn to read, as well to cure her husband of the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffers from as a result of having fought in the Civil War. While not all of the details are historically right--much of the language sounds up-to-the-minute--the heroine's pluck and imagination are always engaging. Hannah wrote The Enchantment. (Feb.)