Almost Heaven — Marianne Wiggins

Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes familiar sunshine and rolling hills will help him put aside the horrors he reported and the volcanic rage in his heart. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor's sister, who is institutionalized with hysterical amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature. Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair -- one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget.

With this breakneck story of love, loss, and the extreme forces of nature, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is at once a series of ever-intensifying metaphors for the powers of the heart and mind and a personal love letter to the American South.