Acclaimed artist Elaine Gordon can't believe her loving husband is gone. After a lifetime spent utterly devoted to her soul mate and their marriage, Elaine is now tetherless, faced with widowhood and all the decisions that come with it, not least of which is what to do with her rambling, now-empty family home. Anxious to console their mother in her time of grief, Elaine's four grown children urge her to put everything on hold and spend some healing time with them. But visiting each unique and complicated child opens Elaine's eyes to the fact that the children she raised have become adults she hardly knows: Sarah, who abandoned Western life for an orthodox enclave in Jerusalem; Lisa, Sarah's accomplished twin and polar opposite, who will do anything for a child of her own; Peter, trapped in a hollow marriage in California; and Denis, the youngest, who just wants Elaine to accept his gay lifestyle. As Elaine tries to bridge the physical and emotional miles, her eyes are opened to the startling truths of her own family, and what she must do to come to terms with her kids' lives—and a future that's completely, wonderfully…hers.
Author
Gloria Goldreich graduated from Brandeis University and did graduate work in Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was a coordinator in the Department of Jewish Education at National Hadassah and served as Public Relations Director of the Baruch College of the City University of New York. While still an undergraduate at Brandeis, she was a winner of the Seventeen magazine short story contest where her first nationally published work appeared. Subsequently, her short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Commentary, McCalls, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Ms., Chatelaine, Hadassah Magazine and numerous other magazines and journals. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated. She is the author of a series of children's books on women in the professions entitled What Can She Be? She has also written novels for young adults, Ten Traditional Jewish Stories, and she edited a prize-winning anthology A Treasury of Jewish Literature. Her novel, Leah's Journey won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1979, and her second novel Four Days won the Federation Arts and Letters Award. Her other novels include Promised Land, This Burning Harvest, Leah's Children, West to Eden, Mothers, Years of Dreams and That Year of Our War. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Troll Book Club. She has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada. Gloria Goldreich is married to an attorney and is the mother of two daughters and a son, and the grandmother of six grandchildren. Harlequin
