A compelling, heartbreaking and beautifully written novel. Friendships and relationships are taken for granted until an earth shattering event throws everything up in the air and everything the characters thought they knew about each other is thrown in to turmoil.
Liz and Sarabeth have been friends forever, childhood neighbours bound together in adolescence by a devastating event, the suicide of Sarabeth's mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed - through Liz's marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth's depressions and her volatile love affairs - their relationship has remained a source of continuity and strength, a fixed point amid the tumult of their adult lives. But when an unforeseen calamity strikes at the heart of Liz's family, all the assumptions - the deepest habits of their friendship - are revealed in a strange new light, and Liz and Sarabeth must question everything they thought they knew about each other and themselves.
Ann Packer received the Great Lakes Book Award and the Kate Chopin Writing Award for The Dive from Clausen's Pier, a national bestseller that has been translated into ten languages. Also the author of Mendocino and Other Stories, she lives in northern California with her family.
