Synopsis: A car crashes, and Maggie Kast, at the peak of a modern dance career, loses a three-year-old daughter. Raised without religion and now mired in grief, she senses a persistent connection to the little girl, a love somehow more powerful than the brute fact of death. This awareness leads her, over three years, to the Catholic Church. After the accident, her marriage is greatly stressed by the entrance of religion into married life, and she and her husband each accuse the other of being too religious or too secular at various times. Despite conflict, dialogue keeps the marriage intimate...

Henriette Greenberg is one of the most captivating and compelling characters I've encountered in years. A woman who wants to "invent culture from scratch," she dives into leftist causes, travels to Alabama to protest the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys, studies Apache culture in New Mexico, and struggles with her damaged sexuality through psychoanalysis and one-night stands that haunt her relationship with the man she truly loves. At one point in the novel, Henriette tells her lover, "You should know who I am." Reader, you should too. -David Jauss, author of Glossolalia: New & Selected...