Summary
Madeleine Shaye has a successful dual career as a concert pianist and TV arts correspondent, a great relationship with her grown daughter, and a love affair that is the envy of friends. She believes she has all the luck. But her blissful life suddenly unravels in this genre-bending novel about a mysterious love with two faces, a shocking betrayal, and the passion to reclaim old dreams.
Praise
“Adolescent idealism, sensual satisfaction, and sexual awakening are a powerful mix...a Yankee Brideshead Revisted.”
—Boston Globe
“Think Waugh’s Brideshead, Dickens’s Bleak House, and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Could more drama be packed into one book?”
—East Hampton Star
“Erica Abeel’s Conscience Point is very sharp indeed... funny and sexy and smart...you’ll fly through it.”
—Alan Furst, author of The Spies of Warsaw
“The plot crescendoes to a melodramatic height as dark secrets are revealed and various betrayals come to light. Abeel manages to tie together those strands in a way that’s satisfying…. Maddy is a highly appealing protagonist…”
—more.com
“Abeel’s fifth novel is an engaging read with plot twists and complex characters….Echoing Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited…this is ultimately a story about retaking the road not taken and reclaiming one’s purpose in life.”
—Library Journal
“…entertaining…engrossing sympathetic story…”
—Booklist
"<a richly drawn portrait of an ambitious yet appealing parvenu's encounter - indeed, collision - with the wealthy and entitled. . . . Ms. Abeel is good at incorporating shrewd observations into a structure evoking the literary traditions of Waugh, Proust, Dickens, plus a touch of Stendhal, Nabokov, and Roth. . . . Could more drama be packed into one book?" —The East Hampton Star
"...I was absolutely shocked and couldn't put the book down...amazing prose...detailed and rich...<it> unfolds perfectly." —Booking Mama
"...a dreamlike novel. Abeel does a wonderful job...an astonishing narrative of one woman's life." —Christy's Book Blog
“Erica Abeel's Conscience Point is very sharp indeed--proceed with caution--but funny and sexy and smart enough so you'll fly through it." —Alan Furst, author of The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel
"An elegantly written, sharply observed saga, swirling with dark secrets and strong personalities. Conscience Point is a wholly satisfying read--enticing, suspenseful and difficult to put down." —John Berendt, author of The City of Falling Angels and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
"I had a very good time reading Conscience Point, savoring both the elegant prose and the page-turning story."
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of Summer Reading: A Novel and Hearts: A Novel
“Conscience Point is a rare novel, gracefully written, deftly unfolding its chilly secrets, exploding with witty little gems on almost every page. It’s a gripping story that could have happened in real life.” —Marion Meade
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Bio
Erica Abeel is the author of four books, including the acclaimed novel Women Like Us, The Last
Romance, I’ll Call You Tomorrow and Other Lies Between Men and Women, and Only When I Laugh, a memoir. A former dancer, Abeel was until recently a professor of French literature at City University of New York. She currently writes film reviews, features and blogs for online film magazines.
