Tell Me Again - by Keith McWalter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For fans of Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts, an intimate and striking novel about decades-old family secrets, grief, and a man's search for the answer to the ultimate question: Can you ever fully know another person?

At the end of a life well lived, one question remains.

At seventy-three, Conrad Burrell thought the surprises were behind him. A retired lawyer of sharp instincts and dry humor, he is still navigating the particular silence that follows the loss of a beloved wife when a stranger appears at his door--an elderly woman who has driven from Connecticut with a secret she has kept for fifty years.

The woman, a former nun named Janet Whelan, claims that Sarah, at sixteen, gave birth to a child she never spoke of. That the child was quietly given away. And that Conrad, if he is willing, should find her.

What follows takes him from the birth records of New York City to the jazz clubs of Paris and back again, through a past his wife kept carefully sealed. But the deeper Conrad searches, the more he must reckon with a question no investigation can fully answer: how well do we ever truly know the people we love most?

Tender, wry and quietly devastating, Tell Me Again is a novel about grief, secrets and the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we share with others.

About the Author

Keith McWalter is the author of When We Were All Still Alive, a literary family saga reviewed by Kirkus as "precise and fluid, weaving characters, settings, and timelines together in a complex tapestry." His latest, speculative novel, Lifers, was described by Harvard's Avi Loeb as "a fascinating read" and by author Chip Walter as "a stunner."

Keith's essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The NewYork Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He's theauthor of the essay blog Mortal Coil and the travel blog Spoiled Guest.A collection of his essays, No One Else Will Tell You: Letters from a Bi-Coastal Father, wonthe Writer's Digest Award forNonfiction, and his familymemoir, Befriending Ending, was anthologized in theliterary magazine Feathered Flounder.

Keith grew up in Mexico and Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Denison University and Columbia Law School, and spent his nonwriting career as a lawyer in New York and San Francisco. He and his wife Courtney live in Granville, Ohio, and Sanibel, Florida.