ABOUT THE BOOK

'Lamb in Love' is set in a rural English village and tells of two people surprised halfway through their lives by - by what? passion? desire? love? Neither of them have the experience to quite identify it. Norris and Vida have known each other forever. Both believe themselves somehow lacking the instinct for romance. Neither has, heretofore, had any idea how to go about falling in love.

Vida Stephen is forty years old, nanny for twenty years to the mentally handicapped son of a rich American widower. Every day, for almost her whole life, she's nodded to postmaster Norris Lamb when calling for her mail. Norris is, at fifty-five, a fussy, stamp-collecting bachelor and church organist who has fallen suddenly, amazingly, and secretly in love with Vida. Sometimes Norris offers pretty stamps to the boy. Witness to Norris and Vida's halting, sometimes embarrassing courtship is that boy, Vida's charge, Manford - mute and clumsy and yet possessed of a strange and gentle intelligence.

It is through Manford, even thanks to him, that Norris and Vida finally come to recognise each other and themselves. Carrie Brown has an affinity for the way love transforms the most ordinary and imperfect people. In 'Lamb in Love', she celebrates a man and a woman who discover in themselves a certain bravery that allows them at last to become the heroes of their own story.

Carrie Brown, whose first novel, 'Rose's Garden', was published in 1998, was a journalist and newspaper editor before she entered the University of Virginia's MFA writing program as a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives now in Sweet Briar, Virginia, with her husband and their three young children and teaches fiction writing at Sweet Briar College.