With compassion and elegance, Stephanie Gertler crafts an emotionally rich story of what it means to survive and thrive against all odds. Like its intricate, interlocking pieces that branch out to shape lives, The Puzzle Bark Tree plumbs the mysteries of the people we can never truly know...of the incomplete memories we carry with us, and the love that can make us whole.

Summary

Grace Hammond Barnett grew up in the emotionally desolate company of her mother and father. Her only happy childhood memories are of times spent with her younger sister, Melanie, and Jemma, the family housekeeper who helped fill the void left by Grace's detached, inaccessible parents. Now a mother herself, Grace feels trapped in a sterile marriage to a prominent surgeon and haunted by recurrent dreams of drowning. Her only anchor is her cherished daughter, Kate.

In the aftermath of her parents' sudden double suicides—a tragedy that leaves Grace, Melanie, and Jemma reeling—Grace is bequeathed a house she never knew existed. Leaving her penthouse in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, she travels alone to Sabbath Landing, New York, to a log cabin house on Canterbury Island, surrounded by Diamond Lake. Here, Grace meets Luke Keegan, a local fishing guide whose family history is inextricably bound to hers...and to a devastating secret buried in the cloudy memory of childhood.