THE VEIL: Awakening

A grief support group is not where Marcus Reeves expected to find the truth about his marriage. It is not where Claire Sutton - who has spent three years facilitating that very group - expected to find the truth about her own. And it is definitely not where Jordan Casey expected to end up at all. THE VEIL: AWAKENING is a literary novel about five ordinary people in Nashville - a construction executive, a school principal, an HVAC technician, a retired surgeon, and a spiritual director - whose separate, unremarkable griefs turn out to be circling the same unexpected discovery. Marcus has built a life so competent that no one, including himself, has noticed how alone it's made him. Claire has learned to sit with everyone else's pain except her own. Jordan can't explain the hollow feeling underneath a life that looks, from the outside, exactly like it's supposed to. Thomas and Elene have already survived their own undoing - and now simply keep showing up, for each other and for three strangers who don't yet know how much they need it. Told with the patience of literary fiction and the emotional generosity of a book that trusts its readers, THE VEIL: AWAKENING never asks you to believe anything. It simply follows five people long enough that you start to notice what they're noticing: that the thing they'd spent their whole lives trying to reach was never as far away as they were told.