Every Last One

Mary Beth Latham has arranged her days around her husband and their three teenage children. She is an ophthalmologist's wife who runs a landscaping business, and she keeps the family's small routines going: the dinners, the carpools, the arguments over homework and boyfriends. Her life is busy and ordinary, and she treats it as secure.

Then one of her sons begins sliding into depression, and Mary Beth turns her attention to helping him. While she is absorbed in that worry, something far more terrible strikes without warning, and the family she has tended so carefully is shattered by an act of violence none of them saw coming.

Most of the novel follows what comes after. Mary Beth has to find a way to keep living when the shape of her life has been torn away, and she does it through stubborn love and a slow, uncertain search for something to hold onto. Small connections with other people become the thread that pulls her toward healing.

Anna Quindlen, author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs, writes about how fragile family life is and how much can turn on decisions that seemed trivial at the time. The book is about confronting the thing you fear most and walking a road you never meant to take.