Carrie Brown's triumphant first novel, Rose's Garden, garnered high praise from the critics for its "simple, beautiful language," and for "plumbing the emotional depths of ordinary human beings." Just a year later, she does it again. Lamb in Love is set in a rural English village the year of the Apollo moon landing and tells of two people surprised, halfway through their lives by...what? passion? desire? love? They haven't the experience to quite...

At her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before: Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer; Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and almost as quickly find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial artist. But Kenneth is losing his eyesight, and when...