From Publishers Weekly
The author of the well-received Eden Close and Strange Fits of Passion exhibits an enhanced mastery of her craft in this potent tale of middle-aged passion. An affecting novel that will probably attract readers of The Bridges of Madison County , it offers the further rewards of psychologically nuanced characterizations and a thoughtful exploration of the relationship between sexuality and time. When 44-year-old real estate insurance salesman Charles Callahan sees a photograph of poet Sian Richards, he recognizes her as the young woman he met three decades earlier at a Catholic camp for teenagers. Impulsively, he writes Sian, and sets in motion the love affair they were destined to have. Though both are married and have children, each is unfulfilled, craving true partnership. Parallels between their lives are evident but not forced: Charles's Rhode Island fishing community is suffering badly from the recession, and he is about to lose his office building and his home; Sian's husband cannot scratch a living from their Pennsylvania onion farm. Charles attended a seminary for two years; Sian considered taking orders. Significantly, though each has fallen away from the Church, they still think and speak in religious imagery: Charles calls himself "an insurer of life, a kind of secular priest," and such terms as venial sins, sacrilege, epiphany, state of grace, guilt and absolution come naturally to both of them. Shreve makes the vortex of their obsession entirely believable, controlling the narrative with authority and restraint. The haunting song of the title provides a leitmotif for a lyrical and increasingly suspenseful narrative told in clear and evocative prose. Author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Sian Richards and Charles Callahan met 31 years ago at camp and had a summer romance. Charles sees Sian's picture in a newspaper advertising her new book. He is in a loveless marriage and is facing the failure of his business. Charles writes to Sian and discovers that she is in a similar situation. They decide to meet and-despite grave misgivings-soon have an affair. Predictably, the affair brings destruction instead of happiness to our lovers. The first half of this audiobook, which features the pair's correspondence, makes for great listening. However, the narrative becomes confusing shortly after the two meet: the listener must keep track of numerous conversations, letters, and remembrances about camp. Gregory Harrison and Judith Ivey alternate as narrators as the action shifts from Charles's perspective to Sian's. Both readers give creditable performances. Recommended for large audio collections or wherever Shreve is popular.Danna C. Bell-Russel, Dist. of Columbia P.L.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
They met and fell in love during a week-long summer camp experience when they were 15. Thirty-one years later, through secret letters and clandestine phone calls, they rekindle their passions and the loss of innocence proves fatal. Using two readers for a boy-girl romance is a logical method of making the piece a dramatic presentation. And it would be easier to discern between flashbacks and current events if the readers used urgency in their voices to help the sentences along. But there is no rushing to a climax that would take this presentation from the mediocre to the very good. Gregory Harrison manages some pathos for the male character, but Judith Ivey's reading is flat, pleasant, and all the same. Not sad, not rapturous, and certainly not dramatic. J.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Shreve, who mixed up such a potent brew of love and tragedy in her earlier Eden Close (1989) and Strange Fits of Passion (1991), serves us something else here--slightly sweeter but also thinner, something that for all its fizz feels flat by the end. Charles Callahan, a 44-year-old Rhode Island insurance broker, is a man who has deep feelings but finds himself emotionally thwarted in the life he leads. He loves his three children, but his marriage to Harriet is passionless. He also knows too many sad, painful secrets about friends and acquaintances, and he's powerless to help. When he chances upon a photograph of poet Siƒn Richards in the Sunday newspaper, his life changes. Siƒn was his first love, 31 years ago at summer camp. Now, at Charles's instigation, the two childhood sweethearts begin corresponding and, before long, resume their old romance. Siƒn, married to melancholy, reserved Stephen, has suffered the loss of a child, and, after some hesitation, she allows herself to turn to Charles with the same urgency he feels for her. Shreve evokes this emotional buildup deftly, complete with stirring old songs and flashbacks to teenaged love, unforgettable in its combination of innocence and intensity. What never does come through here, though, is any real sense of Charles's and Siƒn's marriages. Stephen remains a shadow figure, and Harriet is almost cartoonish--a parody of middle-aged housewife in her pink sweatsuit. There's no real conflict, then--we root for the adulterous lovers. That's why, when tragedy strikes at the end, turning the story into a morality play, it seems all wrong--it's irritating rather than tragic. Love, lust, and redemption all too quickly reduced to sinners who must pay for their sins--but, still, a seductive parable with great mood music. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Leafing through his newspaper's literary supplement one day, Charles Callahan, a middle-aged insurance broker, spots a photograph of his first love, Siân Richards. Married, faithfully if not happily, with three daughters and a struggling business, Charles writes to Siân, a published poet, also married and mother of two children. Siân writes back, and as their correspondence develops into intimacy, three decades after their childhood affair, they agree to meet again. Swept up in the past and consumed by an obsessive love, Siân and Charles risk everything for each other, reaching across time to reclaim what they had in youth. "A thoughtful, beautifully written contemporary romance" (The Washington Post), Where or When is also a heart-wrenching, suspenseful story with a shocking conclusion.



From the Publisher
7 1-hour cassettes


About the Author
Anita Shreve is the critically acclaimed author of The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of Water, and Eden Close. In 1998, Shreve won a New England Booksellers Association award for her body of work and a L.L. Winship/ PEN New England award for The Weight of Water, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize in the U.K. She teaches at Amherst College and lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

ANNOTATION

A fiery, destructive affair begins when a businessman happens upon a picture of an old flame. Their passion is rekindled, beginning a powerful relationship that turns into dark obsession.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Charles Callahan is reading the Sunday paper when an alluring and oddly familiar photo catches his eye: it is Sian Richards, his first love, a face he has not seen for more than three decades. He is entranced by her image, flooded by memories of their teenage summer together, and utterly conpelled to make contact with her again. Charles sends Sian a letter, knowing all the while that "from the very first sentence of the very first note there was nothing innocent about it." Sian writes back - she is now a poet living with her husband and small child on an onion farm in Pennsylvania. She is intrigued that Charles has sought her out after so many years but wary of where their correspondence might lead. For Charles, troubled by financial woes, on the verge of losing his home, and concerned about the security of his family, the letters become a secret obsession and another source of instability in his already complicated life. Despite their reservations, the power of Charles and Sian's attraction leads them to meet again . . . and again. As Charles understands it, "for the two of them, eros is linked with time. It is the very urgency of time he dreads, the sense that their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted." Anita Shreve takes the classic theme of Romeo and Juliet and gives it an unusual twist: two lovers struggle against formidable odds, reaching across a lifetime to reclaim what they once lost. In doing so, they set in motion a tumultuous series of events that moves inexorably to a shocking conclusion.

FROM THE CRITICS

Susan Isaacs - The New York Times Book Review, 1993

Throughout this finely wrought book, Ms. Shreve manages to keep the reader suspended between despair and hope...

Publishers Weekly

A potent and affecting tale of middle-aged passion from the author of Eden Close. (Oct.)

Susan Isaacs - The New York Times Book Review, 1993