The Third Angel audiobook
Each of the three novellas in The Third Angel could stand alone, but the prolific Alice Hoffman, in this her 20th book, has deftly woven together the lives of three women in a family saga across three decades and against the backdrop of a haunted London hotel.
In the first story, it is 1999 and Maddy, a needy and jealous sibling, arrives in London and tries to undo her sister Allie's wedding by sleeping with Paul, the groom. She does not realize that it is Paul's illness that is keeping the reluctant Allie by his side, until, that is, Allie finds herself in love.
The second story takes place in the swinging London scene of 1966. Paul's mother is young Frieda, who rebels against her father's ambitious plans for her by running away to London to become a chambermaid and fall for a drug-addicted rocker.
It is Frieda's father, a country doctor, who tells her that there are, in fact, three angels, any one of which might be riding with him on his house calls: The Angel of Life, The Angel of Death and a third angel, who walks among us and changes our lives in ways we can't predict.
And in the final story, Maddy and Allie's mother Lucy is 12 years old, grieving for her dead mother and chafing at her father's new bride. She comes to London for her stepmother's sister's wedding in 1952 and inadvertantly plays messenger between doomed lovers.
Narrator Nancy Travis does a wonderful job of staying out of the way of Hoffman's skillfully woven narrative, so well constructed that the listener might want to actually read the book in order to track back and forth across time and the pages.
