Alice Adrift - Paperback

Alice Adrift is an intimate human drama about loss and recovery, coupling and uncoupling, and a child caught in the turmoil.

It's the late '90s. Alice Fisher is a composer and music professor. She and her husband David have two beautiful boys-Tobias and Jeremiah. The family lives in the upper Northwest quadrant of Washington DC, home to an urbane mix of journalists, academics and professionals. Life is good. But their seemingly perfect existence is shattered when Jeremiah, their youngest, dies suddenly of a rare illness.

In the years that follow, Alice and David seem to lose their bearings. When Toby appears to be struggling, they move him to an alternative school with a baffling curriculum ("They don't even teach reading, Mom") and a peculiar set of rules ("Absolutely no television!"). Alice doesn't seem to fit in, but David is drawn to everything about the place including, Alice eventually realizes, one of Toby's teachers, the striking woman with the long, tangled red hair.

Not long after David moves out of the house, a group of young men move in next door, ingratiating themselves to Alice. She finds herself attracted to one of them, which sets her further off kilter. How will she find her way back? How will Toby emerge from all this disruption? And what on earth will happen to David?