What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [0]
Berg keeps a tight grip on readers as she takes us back and forth from a 12-year-old’s perspective to the memories and secrets revealed at the reunion—35 years later—of three sophisticated, mature women. By its finish, the story has taken your breath away with its twists and turns; it delivers an impact that stays with you well past the ending.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“In her earlier novel, Talk Before Sleep, Berg was able to draw together remarkable humor and incredible pain with enormous insight into their intricate relationship. She does so again in What We Keep.”
—The Seattle Times
“Fans of Elizabeth Berg are familiar with her extraordinary talent for description—you can almost taste, feel, and hear her novels with amazing intensity.… The poignant twists of rejection and eventual redemption will pull you along at full throttle, making you happy you stayed for the tear-jerking, life-affirming finale.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Elizabeth Berg remembers what it was like to be a child.… She gets it all delightfully right.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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“A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN STORY …
Berg has an almost painterly gift for choosing the telling detail. She neatly accomplishes that most ephemeral trick of memory.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Berg is very good, as always, at reconstructing the emotional and conversational rhythms of girls on the edge of adolescence.”
—New York Daily News
“Compelling … What We Keep takes the reader back to a time when TV didn’t occupy every waking moment, when Mom was generally at home, and when families ate there together. A big night out might be a trip to Dairy Queen.”
—San Antonio Express-News
What We Keep “bring[s] to mind such highbrow novels of girlhood as Lisa Shea’s Hula and Susan Minot’s Monkeys.… Ginny’s shame, anger, guilt, and sorrow are presented with subtlety and suave humor in Berg’s novel, which manages to be charming and painful at the same time.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“EMOTIONALLY WRENCHING AND SPIRITUALLY FULFILLING …
Berg writes with tender confidence … The life a girl growing up in the late ’50s rings true, and the relationship between the sisters is perfectly realized.”
—Dayton Daily News
“Love redeems us … Berg hooks you when you least expect it through her talent for a well-crafted metaphor, and she uses that talent to full advantage in this ode to motherhood.”
—Greensboro News & Record
“Berg’s appeal as an author is our assurance that she’s not creating fictional emotions and reactions, but that she’s taken very real emotions and reactions and wrapped them up neatly. If the events in her books ever happen to us, we will respond exactly the way her characters do.”
—Sunday Oklahoman
“The truths revealed in What We Keep are all too real.”
—Austin American-Statesman
Also by Elizabeth Berg
WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE
THE YEAR OF PLEASURES
THE ART OF MENDING ORDINARY
LIFE OPEN HOUSE
UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG
JOY SCHOOL
THE PULL OF THE MOON
RANGE OF MOTION
TALK BEFORE SLEEP DURABLE GOODS
NEVER CHANGE
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Contents
Other Books by This Author
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Copyright
To women who risk telling the hard truths
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my editor, Kate Medina,
and to my agent, Lisa Bankoff.
Always true.
China
Decorates our table
Funny how the cracks don’t
Seem to show
You’re right next to me
But I need an airplane
I can feel the distance