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.
SummaryGrace 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
suicidesa tragedy that leaves Grace, Melanie, and
Jemma reelingGrace 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.
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