" The Ryries have suffered a loss: the
death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to
express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their
previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and
for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that
little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been
intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties
about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges
with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future. The
couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding
to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely- perhaps
courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into
private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find
themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief
that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to
draw us together. Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The
Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of
relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of
belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world
rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing
itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle.”
