From Amazon
The Probable Future is another novel in which Alice Hoffman makes judicious use of genre material to dramatise fairly conventional stories of romantic love, families and communities. For centuries, ever since the murder of their ancestress Rebecca as a suspected witch, the Sparrow women have inherited powers and tended to keep quiet about them.
Evelyn has a gift for knowing who is lying to her, her daughter Jenny a tendency to dream men's dreams alongside them and young Stella knows what deaths are likely to come to the people she meets or even sees. One attempt by Stella to change a future leads to her feckless father Will being suspected of the murder he tried to prevent.
One of the strengths of the novel is that misfortune is not especially good for Will, who exploits the situation as totally as he has exploited everything and everyone in his life--Hoffman is good on just how much damage can be done by someone who is not malicious, merely weak. In the end, though, this is a novel about healing--which is as much a matter of goodwill as of powers. --Roz Kaveney
Book Description
A magical new novel by a world-class writer whose ability to fuse the everyday and the uncanny within a magnetically compelling and beautifully written narrative is unrivalled. When the women in the Sparrow family reach thirteen, they develop a unique ability. In young Stella Sparrow's case, the gift, both a blessing and a curse, is the ability to see a person's probable future...When Stella foresees a gruesome murder, she tells her charming, feckless father about it, but too late. The murder has already been committed and suspicion falls on him. Her mother Jenny, can read other people's dreams, but sometimes misinterprets them, to her own cost. In Unity, Mass., families go back years, and the same prejudices and mistakes are recycled over generations. Hoffman unlocks the caskets of family life and the secret history of a community, in a gripping story about young love and old love, about making choices - usually the wrong ones - about foresight and consequences, all suffused with the haunting scent of phlox and roses, wisteria and peach blossom, and the hum of bees on a summer evening.
