Year That Follows Book

The story of a woman’s search for her brother’s lost son, orphaned in the wake of his sudden death, drives Scott Lasser’s riveting novel - a work of stunning economy and momentum about a woman’s quest and a family’s longing for wholeness and completion.

Cat is a single mother living in Detroit when her brother is killed in New York, and she sets off in search of his child. Her search is still under way when she gets a call from her father. Sam is eighty and carrying the weight of a secret he has kept from Cat all her life. He asks her to visit him in California, intending to make his peace.

Cat’s journey - toward her father, and her brother’s infant son - and Sam’s journey toward his daughter, his lost son, and a new relationship to both his future and his past are woven into this superbly realized novel about families and the mysteries and ambiguities that inhere in our most primal relations. The result is a deeply stirring work that explores the complexities of home and heritage, and the bonds that even death is powerless to diminish.

Publishers Weekly

A daughter and her father navigate "the year that follows" September 11, revealing secrets and healing old wounds in this slightly higher-brow Nicholas Sparksian melodrama. Single mother Cat searches for the orphaned child of her brother, Kyle, after Kyle died on 9/11 in one of the towers. Turns out Kyle had confessed to Cat the night before that he believes he is a father, and that the child's mother worked in the World Trade Center. A year after the attack and with no orphan located, Cat's father, Sam, a widowed former military man dying of heart disease, invites Cat to join him in marking the anniversary of Kyle's death. Both Cat and Sam embark on emotional journeys toward each other and reconciliation, and along the way they each find love. The numerous sappy passages don't do any favors for a book with an already maudlin premise. (June)

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