Where or When was published by Harcourt Brace in 1993. Charles Callahan and Sian Richards met at a Catholic summer camp in 1963, when they were fourteen. They spent a single week in each other’s company — a week of intense adolescent feeling, of first touch and first heartbreak — and then never saw each other again. Thirty years later, Sian, now a poet, gives a reading that Charles, now a real-estate developer in financial trouble, happens to attend. He recognizes her. They begin an affair.
The title comes from the Rodgers and Hart song — “Where or when” — with its suggestion that love is déjà vu, that we have met before in some other life. Shreve takes the song’s whimsy and turns it serious: Charles and Sian are not reliving a past romance but trying to live inside the memory of one, and the gap between the memory and the reality destroys them. Charles is not the boy Sian remembers; Sian is not the girl Charles has been imagining for three decades. They are middle-aged, complicated, damaged people with obligations, and the affair does not save them — it accelerates their ruin.
Shreve writes the affair with an intensity that makes the reader complicit: you want it to work, even as you see that it cannot. The New England landscape — winter roads, coastal towns, motels — provides the bleak geography of adultery, and Shreve is unflinching about the collateral damage: the spouses, the children, the financial wreckage.
Collecting Where or When
First edition (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20