The Chastened Heart

About the Book

When Professor Alice Prescott writes a best-selling novel based on her passionate, once-troubled marriage to journalist Tom Winslow, the couple’s quiet Connecticut life is shaken by more than bad memories. Th e past itself returns, as if beckoned by Alice’s book. Now, the Winslows learn what their unyielding love has cost them--and others.

Th e Chastened Heart is a novel of middle class American and European manners, satirical yet compassionate, realistic yet committed to the spiritual and ethical concerns of the very best fi ction. Robert Crooke’s deeply emotional narrative urges a reader to follow the Winslows into a past that is both personal and universal, and to embrace with them the mysteries that their marriage represents.

About the Author

Robert Crooke is a journalist, media executive and teacher. His poetry has been published in the West Hills Review, the literary journal of the Walt Whitman Birthplace in Long Island. He has lectured at the University of Connecticut, the University of Nebraska, New York University, and Suff olk County Community College. He began his career as a sports reporter and columnist for the Long Island Press and for thirteen years served as North American press spokesman for Reuters. His three prior novels, American Family (2005), Sunrise (2007), and Th e Earth and Its Sorrows (2010), have received generous critical praise. He and his wife live in Bridgewater, CT.