All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction

In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She’s come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefèvre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He’s a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she’s the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist. Valerie’s thinking about Gerard on assignment in her native New York City, where their son Andre works. In New York City, an airplane has plunged into a skyscraper, and in the short time before anyone understands the significance of this event, Valerie’s mind begins to spiral in and out of the present moment, circling around her intense memories of her father’s death, her youthful relationship with troubled Matthew, and her pregnancy with his child, the crisis that led to her marriage to Gerard, and her fears for the safety of her son Andre and his partner James. Unable to reach her loved ones, Valerie finds memory intruding on a surreal and dreamlike present until at last she connects with Gerard and the final horror of that day.

AUTHOR

Carole Giangrande

Born and raised in the New York City area, Carole Giangrande now resides in Toronto. Her novella, A Gardener On The Moon, was co-winner of the 2010 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest. She’s the author of two novels, An Ordinary Star (2004) and A Forest Burning (2000) and a short story collection, Missing Persons (1994), as well as two non-fiction books: Down To Earth: The Crisis in Canadian Farming (1985) and The Nuclear North: The People, The Regions and the Arms Race (1983). She’s worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio, and her fiction, articles and reviews have appeared in literary journals and in Canada’s major newspapers. While revising new work, she now comments as The Thoughtful Blogger (a space for interesting books and intermittent reflection), available through her website at http://www.carolegiangrande.com.

Reviews

“Giangrande never uses the imagery of 9/11 for gratuitous shock, taking a somber tone as Valerie vacillates among confusion, horror, and self-deception while she waits–surrounded to surreal effect by the mundanity of everyday life–to hear of the fates of those closest to her. This is a softly unsettling book, effective in showcasing the confusion that follows such a personal yet public crisis…”
&mdsh;Publishers Weekly

“All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a deflty crafted meditation on what happens in the aftermath of tragedies both public and private, calling into question the idea that time heals all wounds.”
—Room Magazine

“Has enough time passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for authors to render those tragic events into fiction? For readers left disappointed by hasty attempts from Dom DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Jonathan Safran Foer, this new work from Carole Giangrande may offer an enriching alternative. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air— a title taken from a line in The Communist Manifesto–is at once a slow rumination of those horrific events and an intense, frighteningly accurate recreation of them.”
—Quill and Quire

“With shattering grace Giangrande divines catastrophic grief, the redemptive power of ephemeral joys, and the interconnectedness of all things as past and present conflate in terrorism’s chaos. Memory becomes balm as life, all life, is porous. Exquisite, devastating, this book is a bomb.”
–Carol Bruneau, author of Glass Voices and These Good Hands

“An elegy for lost innocence, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is at once extremely sad and exquisitely hopeful. Its hopefulness resides mainly in the stubborn resonance of the quotidian, and in the kind hearts and good wills of those who refuse to accept evil, no matter how often it crashes into their lives. Carole Giangrande has achieved a great deal in this short, beautiful book; confronting the incomprehensible without despair and describing profound grief without sentimentality.”
–Susan Glickman, author of The Tale-Teller and Safe as Houses