New Year's Eve: A Novel Book

Ghosts haunt the pages of Lisa Grunwald's novel, New Year's Eve. The book opens on New Year's Eve 1985. Erica and her twin sister, Heather, are celebrating the occasion as they do every year, with their husbands and widowed father. Both women are pregnant, due within weeks of each other. Over the years, the sisters have grown apart, and with the death of their mother, their already distant father has become even more difficult to reach. When the babies are born a few months later, it seems that these new "twins" will become the bond reuniting this family. Then, a few years later, Heather's son, David, is killed in an accident and Erica's daughter begins receiving "visits" from him. Soon, the visits drive this family even farther apart than before as Heather desperately clings to the tenuous connection with her dead son while Erica fights to keep her daughter rooted among the living. Among the chapters detailing the sisters' present lives are Erica's recollections of past New Year's Eves, each fragment of memory a piece in the mosaic that is family history. As Erica soon discovers, memory can be as haunting as any ghost. With sure, understated prose, Grunwald explores the mysteries of familial love, the power of the past, and the limits of memory and of forgetting.Read More