The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Ben is the sole survivor of a crime that claims his mother and countless others. He’s just six years old, and already he must find a new place for himself in the world.

Lucy, the doctor who tends to Ben, is grappling with a personal upheaval of her own. She feels a profound connection to the little boy who has lived through the unthinkable. Will recovering his memory heal him or damage him further?

Clare has long believed that the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone anymore, until an unexpected encounter prompts her to tell her story. As they each struggle to confront the events that have defined their lives, something stronger than fate is working to bring them together.

Release date: June 26, 2018

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 368

Reader says this book is...: emotionally riveting (1) terrific writing (1)

Sample

The Possible World

PROLOGUE

AFTER THEY KILL ME, THERE is nothing.

Not exactly nothing. There is a kind of blissful lapping quiet like the unmoored state between sleep and beginning to dream. And then after a long time, or after no time at all, the quiet is broken by bits of color, like bright crockery splinters bobbing on a dark current.

A blond woman holds a blue towel wide—for me? Behind her are two small windows, hazy with steam. I am being given a bath. The woman is no one I recognize, and yet I do.

Now a puppy, fuzzed and golden, pushes the warm leather of his snout into my hand before turning to follow some invisible taunting trace across the grass. A shock of delight goes through me; it’s the first time I am seeing a puppy. But how can that be? I had a dog named Bluestone, black as wet paint, who ran away when I was nine.

The world chatters with echo, tastes meltingly familiar yet new on my tongue, voices like remembered song warbled through water. A snow-collared tree in the yard is ghosted by another, its trunk buried up to its fork in white, branches making a stark lace against a different sky.

It’s all like a sweet dream I didn’t expect.

I don’t perceive the before running out of everything until it is nearly done. Leaving only the solid now and an impression, like a tang of distant fragrance being borne away by a determined wind, that there is—or there once was—something more.