August First

A young curate faces his greatest trial on a sweltering August day. Geoffrey McBirney, barely more than a boy himself, has been left alone to shepherd a vast city parish while his rector vacations. He's drowning in the heat, the isolation, the weight of other people's sorrows, until she walks in. A young woman, beautiful and desperate, terminally ill and trapped in an engagement she cannot bear. She has come to tell a stranger she has decided to die. What follows is a taut, intimate exchange between two people baring their souls: the curate who cannot yet offer what she needs, and the young woman who has already surrendered hope. Shipman Andrews writes with striking psychological precision about the thin line between faith and despair, between saving a life and honoring its ending. This is a novel about the unbearable weight of another person's suffering, and the terrifying, exhilarating possibility of being truly heard. Its early twentieth-century setting only sharpens its modern relevance, for readers who appreciate literary fiction about the limits of religion, the courage to face death, and the strange grace of being present for someone else's crisis.