S T O N E B Y E: a Novel About What Man Believes and Why

He had been in church since he was six years old. He had never once looked at it directly.Dean Kessler has spent twenty-six years deciding why things fall down. Roofs, foundations, retaining walls - somebody has to inspect the damage and name the cause. On the claim form there is a box for the losses no one can be blamed for. Act of God. He has checked it a hundred and fifty times without ever reading the first word.Then a wall that was built right and maintained right comes down in an alley in Hollis, Pennsylvania, and kills a nine-year-old boy walking home from school.That night his daughter calls, the one who left the faith years ago and has never told him why, and asks him a question he cannot answer. He gives her the sentence he has always given. And in the silence afterward he understands that he has sat in a pew for forty-eight years and could not say one true thing about what he believes.So he goes looking. Badly, and in the wrong order, and far too late.What he finds is a dying stonemason who answers questions no one else will answer honestly, a pastor across town who is kind, persuasive, and cannot possibly also be right, a marriage he has been living beside instead of inside, and a seventeen-year-old son carrying something that will surface before the year is out.Stone by Stone is a novel about a man taking apart the faith he inherited to find out whether anything underneath it will hold. It asks the questions people are usually too polite to ask out loud, about suffering, guilt, forgiveness, and death, and it refuses the easy answers, because the man asking them has run out of use for those.