Th e Rags of Time Hardback - 2009

by Howard, Maureen

The concluding volume in aquartet of highly acclaimed novelsthat include A Lover's Almanac,Big as Life, and The Silver Screen

Maureen Howard's new novel is the last in abeautifully written and boldly structured cycle of fourbooks, woven as a tapestry of the seasons, that criticshave praised as "brazenly intelligent," "daredevilclever," and "raptly adventurous."

The Rags of Time tells of an aging Manhattanwriter with an ailing heart who lives near Central Park,who is reviewing and examining both her own historyand the lives she has imagined in her fiction. Interlacedare private rambles and public facts: daily strollsthrough the park; the tough love between her and thetwo men in her life, her husband and her brother; threemythmaking figures from history (Columbus, WalterRaleigh, and Frederick Law Olmstead) who matterprominently to her and her work; and updates on thelives of her fictional characters (an improbable mathematician,his lapsed artist wife, a woman historian inmourning).

A moving meditation on aging and death, onmemory, forgiveness, and redemption, The Rags ofTime is also, in its ambitious interplay of history, politics,art, and life, a book that explores the very necessityof telling stories.