The Art of Mending - by Elizabeth Berg (Paperback)

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?

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Revelations about a seemingly ordinary mother force her adult children to reexamine their lives in this "absorbing novel about family secrets" (The Dallas Morning News).

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, 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.

Review Quotes

"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 études 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

About the Author

ELIZABETH BERG is the author of twelve previous novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Say When, True to Form, Never Change, and Open House (an Oprah Book Club selection in 2000). Durable Goods and Joy School were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and Talk Before Sleep was short-listed for the ABBY Award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, Berg is also the author of a nonfiction book, Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True. She lives in Chicago.