--- product_id: 502153088 title: "HarperCollins The Hour I First Believed" price: "R1021" currency: ZAR in_stock: true reviews_count: 5 url: https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/502153088-harpercollins-the-hour-i-first-believed store_origin: ZA region: South Africa --- # HarperCollins The Hour I First Believed **Price:** R1021 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** HarperCollins The Hour I First Believed - **How much does it cost?** R1021 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.za](https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/502153088-harpercollins-the-hour-i-first-believed) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description Buy HarperCollins The Hour I First Believed by Lamb, Wally online on desertcart.ae at best prices. ✓ Fast and free shipping ✓ free returns ✓ cash on delivery available on eligible purchase. Review: Brilliant book. Review: Wally Lamb is a writer who works very hard and clearly spends a lot of time working on his art. The fact that we must wait so long in between his works of art is a testament to this. Stephen King publishes a dozen or more novels in the time that Lamb will publish one, but despite the fact that King is one of America's best story tellers, Wally Lamb is in a category of his own. It is difficult to compare him to any other writer, largely because each of his books are so very different than the others that unless you know it you would never know that Mr. Lamb penned "She's Come Undone", along with "I Know This Much Is True" and at last, this masterpiece, "The Hour I First Believed." From the start, we know that our central character, in first person, is a man who is troubled. The novel weaves it's way through his difficulty with relationships and how, only recently, he released years of pent up anger and had to face "Anger School" while returning to his childhood home: a farm in Central Connecticut where his Aunt Lolly still lives; she was a woman who had a large and loving hand in raising him. Once again, literature shows us that despite our politicians praise for traditional family values, the bizarre situations of parenting and family life, raised Caelum Quirk (our central character)with three to five parents at any given time, an alcoholic father suffering PTSD from his experiences in the Korean War, his mother and Aunt Lolly who not only worked hard on the family farm with his grandfather but worked outside of the home as well. In the center of the farm is a fifty acre state womens prison that had been designed and started by Caelum's great grandmother,Lydia, the woman who raised Aunt Lolly and her twin brother, Caelum's father. This huge metaphor stands in the middle of the family farm for four generations and carries many secrets, but then so does the Quirk Family-so does any family. PTSD is the prominent element in this book and we see it's effects in subtle ways throughout as well as on grand scales. Caelum's wife Maureen is a school nurse in the same high school where Caelum teaches English: Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The book begins about four days before that fateful Tuesday when, at 11:15 or so, the world stopped to watch two very angry and troubled teenage boys declare war on societal cruelty in the public school setting, killing thirteen and wounding many others, emotionally scarring an entire community and changing the entire world forever. But trauma and tragedy happen all the time and our central character speaks not just in his forty-seven year old guarded and lonely voice, but in his ten year old confused and angry voice, still ripe with guilt and openly discussing his difficulty of allegiance to his drunken father who consistently lets him down and how he allows another student to take the blame for habitually spitting in the school drinking fountains. Right from the start we hear the hints and Mr. Lambs writing style keeps us flipping pages almost as though we are reading Stephen King-a style of writing so different from the thick and intellectual "I know This Much Is True" and the style of "are you SURE this wasn't written by a woman?" in "She's Come Undone." It is in this way that one can see it was no accident: Wally Lamb is one of the finest writers to have ever lived. Caelum is not in school on Tuesday as Aunt Lolly has died and he returns home to Connecticut as the final heir and so his wife, Maureen, is a survivor of the massacre at school but only barely as she was able to hide herself inside a small cabinet in the library where she listened to the worst of the violence that occurred that day. Caelum turns around and comes home to Colorado to be with Maureen which causes him to miss Aunt Lolly's pre-arranged funeral and then, after a little time, he and Maureen return to the family farm where he begins to clean out the family home that holds four generations of diary's letters, photographs and books as well as four generations of secrets, mysteries and answers. The plot of the story is as brilliant as John Irving would write; the psychological twists and fragility of the human mind are captured on a level that Shirley Jackson would have written. No one heals from PTSD, they evolve into acceptance and re-cognition, searching for new ways to feel safe and new ways to trust. Everything in our lives shape who we are and who we become. There is an old Iroquois proverb that sways, "When a man dies with him he takes a library" So that the real meat of the book is in the evolution, understanding and acceptance of how our characters will live. Up until now, 2008 has produced only Richard Russo's "The Bridge of Sighs" that was worthy of The Pulitzer Prize for literature (and in fact, "Bridge of Sighs" is even better than the novel for which Russo already won a Pulitzer) but Mr. Lamb has created a book that stands on it's own, so far above anything else written in such a long time, that "The Hour I First Believed" will join the likes of "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Sound and The Fury", "Tom Sawyer," and "Gone With The Wind" as remarkable American novels. Read it and see if I'm not right. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #428,417 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #71 in Medical Fiction #348 in Alternate History Science Fiction #695 in Death, Grief & Bereavement Fiction | | Customer reviews | 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars (209) | | Dimensions | 12.85 x 4.04 x 19.84 cm | | Edition | 1st | | ISBN-10 | 0007290802 | | ISBN-13 | 978-0007290802 | | Item weight | 1.05 Kilograms | | Language | English | | Print length | 640 pages | | Publication date | 2 April 2009 | | Publisher | HarperCollins | ## Images ![HarperCollins The Hour I First Believed - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71lGIam4yFL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review *by S***F on 17 October 2025* Brilliant book. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review *by D***N on 18 November 2008* Wally Lamb is a writer who works very hard and clearly spends a lot of time working on his art. The fact that we must wait so long in between his works of art is a testament to this. Stephen King publishes a dozen or more novels in the time that Lamb will publish one, but despite the fact that King is one of America's best story tellers, Wally Lamb is in a category of his own. It is difficult to compare him to any other writer, largely because each of his books are so very different than the others that unless you know it you would never know that Mr. Lamb penned "She's Come Undone", along with "I Know This Much Is True" and at last, this masterpiece, "The Hour I First Believed." From the start, we know that our central character, in first person, is a man who is troubled. The novel weaves it's way through his difficulty with relationships and how, only recently, he released years of pent up anger and had to face "Anger School" while returning to his childhood home: a farm in Central Connecticut where his Aunt Lolly still lives; she was a woman who had a large and loving hand in raising him. Once again, literature shows us that despite our politicians praise for traditional family values, the bizarre situations of parenting and family life, raised Caelum Quirk (our central character)with three to five parents at any given time, an alcoholic father suffering PTSD from his experiences in the Korean War, his mother and Aunt Lolly who not only worked hard on the family farm with his grandfather but worked outside of the home as well. In the center of the farm is a fifty acre state womens prison that had been designed and started by Caelum's great grandmother,Lydia, the woman who raised Aunt Lolly and her twin brother, Caelum's father. This huge metaphor stands in the middle of the family farm for four generations and carries many secrets, but then so does the Quirk Family-so does any family. PTSD is the prominent element in this book and we see it's effects in subtle ways throughout as well as on grand scales. Caelum's wife Maureen is a school nurse in the same high school where Caelum teaches English: Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The book begins about four days before that fateful Tuesday when, at 11:15 or so, the world stopped to watch two very angry and troubled teenage boys declare war on societal cruelty in the public school setting, killing thirteen and wounding many others, emotionally scarring an entire community and changing the entire world forever. But trauma and tragedy happen all the time and our central character speaks not just in his forty-seven year old guarded and lonely voice, but in his ten year old confused and angry voice, still ripe with guilt and openly discussing his difficulty of allegiance to his drunken father who consistently lets him down and how he allows another student to take the blame for habitually spitting in the school drinking fountains. Right from the start we hear the hints and Mr. Lambs writing style keeps us flipping pages almost as though we are reading Stephen King-a style of writing so different from the thick and intellectual "I know This Much Is True" and the style of "are you SURE this wasn't written by a woman?" in "She's Come Undone." It is in this way that one can see it was no accident: Wally Lamb is one of the finest writers to have ever lived. Caelum is not in school on Tuesday as Aunt Lolly has died and he returns home to Connecticut as the final heir and so his wife, Maureen, is a survivor of the massacre at school but only barely as she was able to hide herself inside a small cabinet in the library where she listened to the worst of the violence that occurred that day. Caelum turns around and comes home to Colorado to be with Maureen which causes him to miss Aunt Lolly's pre-arranged funeral and then, after a little time, he and Maureen return to the family farm where he begins to clean out the family home that holds four generations of diary's letters, photographs and books as well as four generations of secrets, mysteries and answers. The plot of the story is as brilliant as John Irving would write; the psychological twists and fragility of the human mind are captured on a level that Shirley Jackson would have written. No one heals from PTSD, they evolve into acceptance and re-cognition, searching for new ways to feel safe and new ways to trust. Everything in our lives shape who we are and who we become. There is an old Iroquois proverb that sways, "When a man dies with him he takes a library" So that the real meat of the book is in the evolution, understanding and acceptance of how our characters will live. Up until now, 2008 has produced only Richard Russo's "The Bridge of Sighs" that was worthy of The Pulitzer Prize for literature (and in fact, "Bridge of Sighs" is even better than the novel for which Russo already won a Pulitzer) but Mr. Lamb has created a book that stands on it's own, so far above anything else written in such a long time, that "The Hour I First Believed" will join the likes of "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Sound and The Fury", "Tom Sawyer," and "Gone With The Wind" as remarkable American novels. Read it and see if I'm not right. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review *by E***T on 14 August 2019* Another masterpiece from a master storyteller. Thoroughly enjoyed it! --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/502153088-harpercollins-the-hour-i-first-believed](https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/502153088-harpercollins-the-hour-i-first-believed) --- *Product available on Desertcart South Africa* *Store origin: ZA* *Last updated: 2026-04-23*