In Oceanside, in Southern California, seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner is grieving her mother's recent suicide when she takes up with Luke Sheppard, the twenty-one-year-old son of the pastor of the Upper Room Chapel — a onetime football star whose career-ending injury has left him waiting tables. The pregnancy that follows, and the abortion she chooses — secretly paid for by Luke's mother — become the hidden center of three lives. Nadia leaves for the University of Michigan and law beyond it, keeping the secret even from Aubrey Evans, the devout, wounded friend she makes at the chapel; years later Aubrey marries Luke, and Nadia, returned home to care for her ailing father, is drawn back into the triangle the secret built. Watching over all of it are "the Mothers," the elder women of the Upper Room, whose collective voice narrates in part — judging, speculating, remembering — a chorus of the community that raised, and failed to protect, its children. Bennett's debut novel, a New York Times bestseller that made her a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, is a study of motherhood in all its forms — lost, refused, imposed, and chosen — and of how one season's decision is paid for across decades.
Author: Brit Bennett · Original publisher: Riverhead Books (New York), 2016
