The Hour I First Believed
By Wally Lamb

740 pages. Harper. $29.95.



A decade ago Wally Lamb had two Oprah-fueled bestsellers. Now he’s back with his third novel, which begins with the 1999 attack on Columbine High School. Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, both work at the school, he as an English teacher, she as a nurse. On the day of the attack, Maureen is in the school library; she escapes death at the hands of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris by hiding in a cabinet. Caelum is at his family’s home in Connecticut, where his aunt has just died. For the rest of the book the couple try to come to terms with that horrific day and with the flood of disasters and revelations that follow in its wake. One night, trying to understand what has happened to them, Caelum researches “chaos theory” on Google. In one entry: “Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another. Well, they had that right: there was our life before April the twentieth, and our life after it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/books ... ?ref=books