Helen Keller in Love

Most of us think of Helen Keller either as the wild blind-deaf child depicted in the film The Miracle Worker (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) or as an international role model in her adult years. In this eye-opening and thoroughly involving debut novel, Sultan (winner of a PEN Discovery Award for fiction) takes a little-known episode in Keller's long life—her affair with and brief engagement to a 29-year-old newspaper reporter, Peter Fagan, in the fall of 1916—and imagines what their romance was like. (Actual letters from the affair were burned.) In the process, Keller as a woman in her thirties yearning for love comes alive for the reader. Still, as interesting as her ill-fated romance is, it is Keller's life of activism coupled with her dependence on others for basic things like having her letters read to her that will move readers and make them eager to learn more about her life.