Grace - Softcover

"Extremely deserving of its title, this gorgeous, meditative book is a graceful rendering of one couple's journeys and explorations toward and away from each other. A moving love story, it shows us how a deferred dream can erode a marriage and how grace can sometimes put us to the test, even as it redeems."
Edwidge Danticat, author of Claire of the Sea Light

"Highly recommended . . . a deeply felt and compassionate novel. Wise and resonant, it will strike a chord with readers."
Library Journal

"Nunez is able to write the interior monologue of a changing mind, to show grace at work in the human heart."
Book Street USA

An exquisite love story . . . Once again, accomplished author Elizabeth Nunez lends readers her remarkable voice in this masterfully crafted story.”
New American

"Grace speaks to our propensity for self-delusion that cripples our relationship with ourselves and with those we profess to care deeply about."
Black Issues Book Review

Justin and Sally Peters, both passionate educators Justin, a hardened, Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature at a small public Brooklyn college, and Sally, a gentle and spirited elementary school teacher teaching her students that happiness and joy require strength and perseverance ;have had a calm and loving marriage, graciously enlivened by their curious four-year-old daughter, Giselle.

Suddenly Sally, coming from a wrought past punctured with loss, begins to pull away from the man in whom she originally found comfort and safety. When Giselle starts asking him if Mommy is okay, Justin worries that Sally is on the verge of leaving him. Is she harboring feelings for a lost lover or, Justin wonders, was she ever really meant to be his wife? As Sally retreats deeper and deeper into herself, Justin wonders if her past has really come to claim her once and for all.

While Justin reads Hamlet to his students, he tries to find answers in the literature that became his profession. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow, Hamlet concludes. Let be. Does Shakespeare know how to keep Sally from leaving? Should Justin do nothing and wait for Sally to right herself? How deep can he read before he knows how to keep his family together?

As deep snow falls in Brooklyn, Justin and Sally's relationship is put to the test. What once was a warm and cozy marriage bed becomes as cold as the encroaching winter frost. Kept in orbit by their curious daughter, Giselle, the couple must decide if staying together is in everyone's best interest.

Elizabeth Nunez's classic fifth novel follows Justin and Sally through the harrowing trials of love and family and offers a remarkably tender introspection into the aching and sometimes harsh downturns of a modern-age love story.

Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of nine novels and a memoir. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls Even in Paradise, her most recent novel, A dazzling epic triumph.” The novel was an O, The Oprah Magazine and Essence selection. Nunez’s other novels are: Boundaries, Anna In-Between, Prospero’s Daughter, Bruised Hibiscus, Grace, Discretion, Beyond the Limbo Silence, and When Rocks Dance. Her awards include a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, an American Book Award, and an Independent Publishers Book Award. Four of her novels were selected as New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her memoir Not for Everyday Use won the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Nunez received a Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from Trinidad and Tobago National Library Systems and her novel Anna In-Between was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez has also written several monographs of literary criticism and is coeditor of the anthology Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. She is the cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the NY Emmy-nominated CUNYTV series Black Writers in America. She holds a PhD degree from NYU and is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York.