Bliss, Remembered

With Bliss, Remembered, the celebrated Frank Deford has produced a work of literature that ranks with the best of his many novels, including Everybody's All American, which Sports Illustrated ranked as one of the 25 best sports books of all time. In Bliss, Remembered, Deford explores new territory as he tells two love stories from the perspective of a beautiful should-have-been Olympic champion named Sydney Stringfellow. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Sydney begins an intense love affair with a German, but the affair abruptly ends when political forces tear them apart. Back in the US, Sydney - daring, vulnerable, and memorable - is left healing her broken heart when a striking American begins to pursue her. In Deford's tender novel, the simplicity and honesty of choices of the heart clash with a brutal time - a time when choices seemed so dire in the enveloping shadows of a changing world.