Eleanor, Beyond Seeing

About the book

Edward Hale has spent eleven years walking other people's fields with a metal detector, chasing whatever the ground is willing to give up. Old coins, buried buckles, the occasional scrap of real history. What he finds on an ordinary Tuesday morning, knocking on a farmhouse door to ask permission, is something the ground never could. Eleanor Marsh is twenty-two, blind since childhood, and she opens the door not knowing what the morning light is doing behind her. She also has a book, hidden in the barn for five years, that her father once decided she was too young to hear. Patient with a small world, patient waiting for someone to finally treat her like the sharp, curious, entirely capable woman she is rather than someone to be managed. Edward, unhappily married and quietly lost himself, finds in her a directness he's never once been offered. Told with warmth and unusual gentleness, this is a story about attention paid completely, trust given without conditions, and a farmhouse barn that becomes, for one golden season, the whole of the world for two people who badly needed to be truly seen. A story about the particular kind of treasure that has nothing to do with what's buried in the ground.What begins as a simple offer. He'll read to her, since he's going to be on her father's land regardless, becomes a summer neither of them planned for.