The Particular Light In Ice

The Particular Light In Ice is the story of two warring neighbours forced together by an ice storm. It's a funny, delicately layered, at times heartbreaking, though ultimately life-affirming, novel about war and peace, and how the sad reverberations of conflicts persist through generations...as do those of love.

Billionaire Lily Moreau, the demanding mistress of a high-tech country estate, wakes up one morning to discover that a catastrophic ice storm has encased her world in unyielding ice, downing her power line, and stranding her without electricity, or internet, heat, water or light. Her cell phone is dead. Her electric garages won't open. The one road into town is blocked by downed trees. And to top all that, it's New Years day, her staff have the day off, and her husband is schmoozing on his yacht in the South Pacific. She is alone in her cold and massive house.

Twinkling across an ice-encrusted field, Lily can see the wind-powered Christmas lights of her off-grid hippy neighbour, Django Limburger. A cosy curl of smoke rises from his chimney. To Lily, Django is an exasperating, tree-hugging, uncouth "gypsy", who lives in a "bit-of-nothing house", no bigger than her master bedroom. She and Django are at war over landscaping plans. And even though Lily is in desperate need of neighbourly help, Django is the last person on earth she can ask for it.

Django deeply disapproves of Lily. To him, she is a judgemental snob, and an out-of-touch "rich lady" who lives wastefully and selfishly. When he sees her slipping her way across the icy field to his house, his initial reaction is to pretend he's not home. Django's beloved Roma grandfather, a survivor of Nazi work camps during WWII, has left a letter with instructions: "to be opened on the first anniversary of my death"-which happens to be today. The last thing Django needs on this momentous day fraught with sadness and anticipation is a confrontation with his self-obsessed neighbour.