Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

Book Overview

"An exhilarating emotional roller-coaster ride."
--Washington Post

"Haunting, beautifully-written, and heart-wrenching."
--Harlan Coben

With his shattering, extraordinarily affecting debut novel, Light of Day, author Jamie M. Saul made a powerful, incontrovertible statement: a major American writer had arrived on the literary scene. The author of The First Warm Evening of the Year, Saul mesmerizes with the unforgettable story...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062190938
• ISBN13: 9780062190932
• Release Date: March 2012
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Can I Give It Ten Stars?

This novel is a humble masterpiece. I felt blessed just to hold it in my hands. In the most beautiful, elegant, flawless writing the author tells a tale of love, loss, grief, abandonment, and fathering with such delicate precision you know immediately you are in the presence of a genius. An artist with words, the author leads you slowly into a father's pain and agony. You will read it once for the story and then again for the appreciation of every finely crafted sentence. And then you will be haunted for days wondering what happens next, after THE END because you will care, deeply, for this father who has been so wounded.

Excellent Debut!

LIGHT OF DAY by Jamie M. Saul August 13, 2005 Rating: 4 ½ stars Earlier this summer I read a wonderful book titled LIGHT OF DAY by Jamie M. Saul. One of my favorite books this year so far, it is the story of a man, Jack Owens, who must come to terms with his 14-year old son's suicide. As the book begins, Jack is in his office at the college where he teaches, and is waiting to get a call from his son. Instead, he receives word from a detective that his son has been found dead of an apparent suicide. LIGHT OF DAY examines a parent's grief of the death of a child, but more than that it focuses on whether a person can be counted responsible for someone else's suicide. As Jack looks back on their lives, starting from his courtship with Danny's mother, Anne, their marriage and breakup, and finally Jack and Danny's life together in this small college town, Jack grapples with the idea that he could have prevented Danny's death. Jack, as well as the reader, will begin a journey into Danny's life, and it isn't until the very end of the book that one understands Danny's angst, and why he did what he did. LIGHT OF DAY brings to mind some ethical and moral questions, including "what is the right thing" in terms of one's decisions in life? Is loyalty more important than morality? Is it more important to stay true to oneself? These are the questions that Jack ponders every day, (as does Danny) as he tries to put together the puzzle to Danny's suicide. I really loved LIGHT OF DAY, for its focus on character and heavy moral and ethical questions that will have one question the same issues. I still do not know whether Jack did the "right thing" at the end of the book. It's a book that had me thinking for days after I read that last page.

Compelling, thought provoking, engrossing

This book took me in with pure craftsmanship and kept me with a compelling story and beautifully drawn characters. A lovely novel that should not be missed. If your book club is up for an intense, multi-faceted discussion, I highly recommend LIGHT OF DAY.

Light of Day, a powerful journey

Everyone struggles with at least one of life's important dilemmas: dealing with loss, living with grief, managing the past, or facing the future. By the end of one tragic day, Jack Owens faces them all, for every day to come. In LIGHT OF DAY, Jamie M. Saul's poignant story about this intelligent professor and single father, Jack works hard to give full attention to his job and his son, but is faced suddenly with failure when he learns his son, Danny has killed himself. For the rest of the book we follow Jack as he examines the past for understanding and grapples with the pain of the present. LIGHT OF DAY is a book of great empathy and respect, for the dead, the abandoned, and all those affected. It is an exploration of pain, and a mystery that unfolds slowly and elegantly.

A Moving, Elegant Novel

Losing a child is every parent's worst nightmare --- the rending of a pure love; the loss of a life that one is charged with protecting. A life full of promise and opportunity lies fallow and unfulfilled. But when that loss comes as a result of a suicide, those feelings are wrapped up in an unbearable sense of failure, and life for the surviving becomes an endless refrain of "Why?" In LIGHT OF DAY, Jamie M. Saul tells the story of Dr. Jack Owens, an intelligent, successful professor of Film Studies at a small Indiana college. The term is ending, and Jack is trying to wrap up the grading of final projects so that he can escape on a long-planned summer vacation with his son Danny. As a single father, Jack struggles with the work-family balance known only too well to single parents everywhere, and feels guilty that he's spent so little time in the last week with his son, who seems like a smart, well-adjusted teen, displaying a bit of moodiness common to all fifteen-year-olds but otherwise smart and sharp for his age. A few moments later, however, Jack's idyllic spring afternoon at the office is shattered as a police detective arrives with the heartbreaking news: Danny has killed himself. The chapters that follow are heartbreakingly realistic and completely riveting. As Jack spirals through layers of grief and despair, author Jamie Saul deftly slides between his painful day-to-day coping and flashbacks of earlier times spent with Danny and Danny's mother, Anne, who left Jack and Danny when Danny was four. With the help of an unexpected friend, Jack carefully begins to unravel the spool of the life he'd built for himself and his son, and he begins to understand the different kinds of losses and the impact they can have on our lives. Treating all of his characters with great respect, Saul's prose is both muscular and polished, and his sense of timing is impeccable. While the unblinking focus on Jack's lonely grief feels claustrophobic at times, it's unerringly realistic, and what begins to seem like a simple story of a man becoming unhinged by a tragedy soon takes unexpected twists and turns as Jack begins to piece together some answers to the questions that made up the final weeks of Danny's life. Saul, a journalist and television writer by trade, shows sensitivity and a rare understanding of the human psyche in his debut novel. As the story begins to really gather steam in the final chapters, Saul shows remarkable restraint and grace in revealing his ending. LIGHT OF DAY is a moving, elegant novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page is turned. --- Reviewed by Lourdes Orive