Grace by Elizabeth Nunez

Grace by Elizabeth Nunez

Justin and Sally Peters, both passionate educators-Justin, a hardened, Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature at a small public Brooklyn college, and Sally, a gentle and spirited elementary school teacher teaching her students that happiness and joy require strength and perseverance-have had a calm and loving marriage, graciously enlivened by their curious four-year-old daughter, Giselle.

Suddenly Sally, coming from a wrought past punctured with loss, begins to pull away from the man in whom she originally found comfort and safety. When Giselle starts asking him if Mommy is okay, Justin worries that Sally is on the verge of leaving him. Is she harboring feelings for a lost lover or, Justin wonders, was she ever really meant to be his wife? As Sally retreats deeper and deeper into herself, Justin wonders if her past has really come to claim her once and for all.

While Justin reads Hamlet to his students, he tries to find answers in the literature that became his profession. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow, Hamlet concludes. Let be. Does Shakespeare know how to keep Sally from leaving? Should Justin do nothing and wait for Sally to right herself? How deep can he read before he knows how to keep his family together?

As deep snow falls in Brooklyn, Justin and Sally's relationship is put to the test. What once was a warm and cozy marriage bed becomes as cold as the encroaching winter frost. Kept in orbit by their curious daughter, Giselle, the couple must decide if staying together is in everyone's best interest.

Elizabeth Nunez's classic fifth novel follows Justin and Sally through the harrowing trials of love and family and offers a remarkably tender introspection into the aching and sometimes harsh downturns of a modern-age love story.

Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of a memoir and nine novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors' Choice. Her two most recent books are Not for Everyday Use, a memoir, which won the 2015 prestigious Hurston Wright Legacy Award for nonfiction, and the novel Even in Paradise, a contemporary version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Her other novels are: Boundaries (nominated for the 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Fiction); Anna In-Between (PEN Oakland Award for Literary Excellence and long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award); Prospero's Daughter (2010 Trinidad and Tobago One Book, One Community selection, and the 2006 Florida Center for the Literary Arts One Book, One Community); Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award); Beyond the Limbo Silence (Independent Publishers Book Award); Grace; Discretion; and When Rocks Dance. Nunez received her PhD from New York University and is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches courses on Caribbean Women Writers and Creative Writing.