Those paintings of the Biglins in action have a terrible immediacy.

The whole house spoke to him of his grandfather, with a terrible immediacy which brought back all his grief and rage at the old man's death.

Similarly, "refugee," a word that plagues the 20th century, took on terrible new immediacy in the sight of desperate Kurds and Shiites, so many women and babies among them, so many old and injured, carrying their scant yet burdensome belongings into the mountains in a cold rain.

Ohhh, I do not expect them to seek the terrible immediacy of every living moment which I must experience.

But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a picture of power available even to untrained farmboys on distant planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present.

All of these elements gave Ms. Didion's account - richly detailed and occasionally eerily detached - both a terrible immediacy and a sense of existential mystery, factors Mr. Hare feels will make fine drama.

Drizzt could tell himself over and over that Bruenor was satisfied, that the dwarf had climbed his mountain and won his personal battle, but in the terrible immediacy of his death, those thoughts did little to dispel the drow's grief.

Now those memories he had stolen from the Adept were at one remove ... as if they were things from very distant childhood, clear, but without the terrible immediacy.

There is also a terrible immediacy about a photograph by Herbert G. Ponting of the explorer Captain Scott, as he sat working in his camp in 1911 before heading out to the South Pole.

So when Vera is distraught in this novel - and "The Book of Happiness" is not only, perhaps inevitably, full of tears, it is also unusually interesting about the ways people cry - her anguish has a terrible immediacy.