Brief Description
From the author of "We Are All Welcome Here" comes her most ambitious work to date--a moving novel where unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past?
Learn More about the Book
From the author of We Are All Welcome Here comes her most ambitious work to date--a moving novel where unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past?
Front Cover Glimpse
It begins with the sudden revelation of astonishing secrets--secrets that have shaped the personalities and fates of three siblings, and now threaten to tear them apart. In renowned author Elizabeth Berg's moving new novel, unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past?
Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year's gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family's restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness.
Readers have come to love Elizabeth Berg for the "lucent beauty of [her] prose, the verity of her insights, and the tenderness of her regard for her fellow human" ("Booklist). In The Art of Mending, her most profound and emotionally satisfying novel to date, she confronts some of the deepest mysteries of life, as she explores how even the largest sins can be forgiven by the smallest gestures, and how grace can come to many through the trials of one.
"From the Hardcover edition.
Review Quotes
1. "Maybe Freud didn't know the answer to what women want, but Elizabeth Berg certainly does."
--"USA Today"
"Elizabeth Berg writes with humor and a big heart about resilience, loneliness, love, and hope. And the transcendence that redeems."--Andre Dubus
"Berg's writing is to literature what Chopin's etudes are to music--measured, delicate, and impossible to walk away from until they are completed."
--"Entertainment Weekly"
"Berg knows her characters intimately....She gets under their skin and leaves the reader with an indelible impression of lives challenged and changed."
--"The Seattle Times"
"Elizabeth Berg is one of those rare souls who can play with truths as if swinging across the void from one trapeze to another."
--Joan Gould
"From the Hardcover edition."
