The WHY OF THINGS
ABOUT
Since the loss of her seventeen-year-old daughter less than a year ago, Joan Jacobs has struggled to keep her tight-knit family from coming apart. But Joan and Anders, her husband, are unable to snap back into the familiarity and warmth they so desperately need, both for themselves and for their surviving daughters, Eve and Eloise. The family flees to their summer home in search of peace and renewal, only to encounter an eerily similar tragedy when a pickup truck drives into the quarry in their backyard killing a young local named James Favazza.
As the Jacobs family learns more about the inexplicable events that preceded that fateful evening, each of them becomes increasingly tangled in the emotional threads of James’s story: fifteen-year-old Eve is determined to solve, on her own, the mystery of his death; Anders finds himself facing his own deepest fears; and seven-year-old Eloise unwittingly adopts James’s orphaned dog. For herpart, Joan becomes increasingly fixated on James’s mother, a stranger whose sudden loss so closely mirrors her own.
With an urgent, beautiful intimacy that her fans have come to expect from this “bitingly intelligent writer” (The New York Times), Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop delivers here a powerful, buoyant novel that explores the complexities of family relationships and the small triumphs that can bring unexpected healing. The Why of Things is a wise, empathetic, and exquisitely heartfelt story about the strength of family bonds. It is an unforgettable and searing tour de force.
Simon and Schuster
BUY
Hardcover: 320 Pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 1-4516-9575-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-9575-5
Praise for “The WHY OF THINGS”:
“Keenly observed...richly drawn….[Winthrop]’s message, as complex as it is simple, is that the unendurable can and will be endured only if one chooses to go on.”
“Once again, Elizabeth Winthrop conjures light from a dark place in her beautifully constructed, touching novel The Why of Things. Why do some so loved willfully leave us is the question Winthrop sets out to answer—and what meaning she renders from this mystery! The book starts and ends at the same quarry’s edge, but a quarry changed. Winthrop’s quiet magic makes the water’s mutable darkness bearable and better—nothing to be afraid of, a substance of possibilities.”
“Totally engrossing from start to finish. Winthrop’s scene building is captivating, her characterization intricately layered, and her ability to build tension both preternatural and Hitchcockian—the suspense accumulating so subtly that you don’t notice you’re getting wound up ‘til you put the book down to take a break and suddenly your teeth are clenched.”
“With insight, respect and luminous clarity, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop plumbs the afterlife of grief: the futile attempts to reconcile old habits and perceptions to the relentless questions that trail behind any unspeakable loss. This haunting, shimmering novel reminds us how all of us know our families: with unimaginable intimacy, and hardly at all.”
“Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop is one of the finest writers of her generation. With deeply moving intelligence and a clean, spare style, she gets right to the heart of loss and survival.”
“An exquisitely written portrait of grief and healing.”