The Glorious Between

Emily is dying of an illness lodged in her brain. It has also erased her past and left her able to hold only fragments of the present, so she sometimes feels she has never truly existed. Caught in a kind of suspended stillness, she believes she is more than her physical body, yet she knows how little room hope has against hard facts. Her body is failing, and she accepts that this is all she is.

Patrick, a neurologist at the top of his field, is also Emily's partner. He keeps vigil at her bedside, searching for some way into her fractured memory, and as he speaks about his own past, the only life Emily can still picture, she builds an imagined connection to the people in it: his father, his brother, and above all his mother, Alessandra, a woman of rare gifts and deep spiritual conviction.

The illness that has taken Emily's memory will eventually take her life, and Patrick, however skilled, cannot prevent it. The one person who might reach her is Alessandra, who is said to commune with rivers, call up the sun, and turn the moon aside with her fingertips.