Tell Me Again: A Novel

For fans of Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts, an intimate and striking novel about decades-old family secrets, grief, and a man's search for the answer to the ultimate question: Can you ever fully know another person?

At the end of a life well lived, one question remains.

At seventy-three, Conrad Burrell thought the surprises were behind him. A retired lawyer of sharp instincts and dry humor, he is still navigating the particular silence that follows the loss of a beloved wife when a stranger appears at his door—an elderly woman who has driven from Connecticut with a secret she has kept for fifty years.

The woman, a former nun named Janet Whelan, claims that Sarah, at sixteen, gave birth to a child she never spoke of. That the child was quietly given away. And that Conrad, if he is willing, should find her.

What follows takes him from the birth records of New York City to the jazz clubs of Paris and back again, through a past his wife kept carefully sealed. But the deeper Conrad searches, the more he must reckon with a question no investigation can fully answer: how well do we ever truly know the people we love most?

Tender, wry and quietly devastating, Tell Me Again is a novel about grief, secrets and the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we share with others.