"Late on a summer night in 1985, three teenagers are in a tragic car crash on the quiet, suburban Division Avenue. A girl is killed, and Theo and Sarah Wilf are left with a devastating secret that will haunt their family forever. By the time the Shenkmans move in across the street, the accident has faded into the past, but secrets haunt both families and cause them to become intimately intertwined. When Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant but lonely child, befriends Ben Wilf, who is struggling with his wife's decline from Alzheimer's, he once again entangles the families' fates and sets in motion the spellbinding, unforgettable climax"--

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, sorrow and love. • "A beautiful book by a writer of rare talent.”— Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of WILD Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time—abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning—a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become. What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise—how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.

At 23, Dani Shapiro had drifted far from her New Jersey roots and family. Then an accident on snowy roads left both her parents critically ill in hospital. This memoir traces Shapiro's journey back to the world she left behind, where she was faced with the task of taking care of two people who needed her desperately.

Joanna Hirsch is an aspiring off-Broadway actress whose complex life has finally shattered. Having tried to normalize relations with her mother, Georgia, a world-renowned sculptress who left her family nearly twenty years before to pursue her art, Joanna unexpectedly learns that Georgia has flown again - this time from her SoHo loft in New York to the Umbrian mountains of Italy. Joanna's lover of the last ten years, theater director Nigel Easden, has also gone, leaving a goodbye note on top of a pile of newspapers that contain scathing reviews of his most recent production. And Joanna's oldest and most complicated relationship, with her childhood friend Billy Overmeyer, has ended in random urban tragedy. Suddenly, Joanna is all alone. Fugitive Blue is a richly told story about a daughter's love for her brilliant and difficult mother. Lyrical and unflinching, this new novel by an author whose "language sings of Fitzgerald" (New York Times) takes Joanna Hirsch on a journey from her lonely suburban childhood to a life as forcibly created as one of her mother's chiseled from the ashes, the wreckage of her past.