cover image, with spine
“Unafraid of complexity and full of vitality, this is a tale that should have been told before now; Mrs. Dalloway finds her passionate young Sally not in her long-ago past but in today’s flower shop. This smart and beautifully written novel will stay with you a long time; indeed, it will teach you how to live.”
– Elizabeth Stark, author of Shy Girl
“The sheer beauty of Wadsworth’s spare and elegant placement of words is awe inspiring … This book is a deeply honest and illumined exploration of many interwoven themes — love, loss, mortality, the encroachments of old age, and the journey of awakening to one’s own authentic nature.”
– Dia Tsung, in “The Ink Brain”
“Ann Wadsworth’s Light, Coming Back folds the very young, the middle-aged, and the very old in one another’s arms. The author’s eloquent fiction tells romantic and sexual love as it really exists, not as it is presumed to be.”
– Bertha Harris, author of Lover
“Light, Coming Back is beautiful, wise, elegant — luminous proof that whatever our age, love can upend us with all of its confusions. This is a novel – and a writer – we’ve been waiting for.”
– Katherine V. Forrest, author of Curious Wine
From Light, Coming Back, chapter 15:
Mrs. Medina began to dream of Lennie living with her, the two of them in an exotic place. This was the depth of her infatuation. She yearned for a place that would surprise her: coming across the crest of a hill and seeing the sea spread out suddenly like a glittering pool of spilt champagne; misty dawns in which strange birds cried; huge, deep beds with sheets that smelled of lavender; rich, fragrant coffee. She imagined them in grand hotels (which she liked) and in isolated mountain cabins (which she thought Lennie would prefer). The scenarios were long and intricate. In Mrs. Medina’s mind they danced in nightclubs where it made no difference, or woke in an airy bedroom in a red-roofed Spanish villa, high above the sea. They had long meals by candlelight, and Mrs. Medina fed Lennie hearts of palm from a slender silver fork. She placed them in a grand circle of her old friends, who related marvelous stories in which Mrs. Medina was the magician.
Hours would pass.
Patrick would creep by the door, observe her silently, and depart.
“Can’t you do anything else?” he muttered to her at breakfast. “Sex is sex. It doesn’t have to take over your life.”
Light, Coming Back was short-listed for the Ferro-Grumley Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award, and was a Book of the Month Club selection. It was translated into French and German with the title Mrs. Medina. All editions available on amazon.com
light, coming back was published in 2001.