Tell Me Again

An intimate and striking novel about decades-old family secrets, and a man's search for the answer to the ultimate question: Can you ever fully know another person?

In the autumn of a life well lived, Conrad Burrell thought the surprises were behind him. A retired lawyer of sharp instincts and dry humor, he is still navigating the particular silence that follows the loss of a beloved wife when a stranger appears—an elderly woman who has sought him out to share a secret she has kept for fifty years.

The woman, a former nun named Janet Whelan, claims that Conrad’s wife Sarah, at sixteen, gave birth to a child she never spoke of. That the child was quietly given away. And that Conrad, if he loved Sarah, should find that child.

Janet’s challenge sends Conrad from his quiet Pennsylvania town to the birth records of New York City, to the jazz clubs of Paris, and to a mesa high in the Santa Fe desert, seeking to uncover a past his wife kept carefully hidden. But the deeper Conrad searches, the more he must reckon with a question no investigation can fully answer: How well do we ever truly know the people we love most?

Tender, wry, and quietly devastating, Tell Me Again is a novel about grief, kinship, and the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we share with others.