Stop Here
A novel
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Ava, Mila, and Rosalyn all work at Murray's Diner in Long Island. They are friends and coworkers struggling to hold together their disordered lives. While Ava privately grieves the loss of her husband in the first Iraq War, Mila struggles to dissuade her seventeen-year-old daughter from enlisting in the second. Rosalyn works as an escort by night until love and illness conspire to disrupt the tenuous balance she'd found and the past she'd kept at a safe distance. The promise of a new relationship with a coworker soon begins to restore Ava's faith in her own ability to feel, and Mila learns through wrenching loss that children must learn from their own mistakes. But ultimately it is love–for one another and for their wayward families–that sustains them through the pain and uncertainty of a world with no easy answers.
With tender, unadorned prose and a supremely human sympathy for the triumphs and defeats of everyday life, in this long-awaited second novel Beverly Gologorsky delivers a moving and incisive story about loss, friendship, and healing in the shadow of a seemingly endless war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gologorsky's second novel, like her first, examines the lives of working class families impacted by war this time by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tie that binds is Murray's Diner, where Ava, Mila, Nick, Rosalyn, and Bruce work their shifts, living from paycheck to paycheck (though Rosalyn's secret side life as an escort puts her financially ahead of her colleagues). The author treats each singular story line with insight, compassion, and no sentimentality. Ava lost her husband to the Iraq War and has a son who never knew his father. Her vulnerability is epitomized by a romantic encounter in the diner that goes horribly awry. Mila's daughter, Darla, sees military enlistment as the only way to a better life, while ignoring the potentially devastating consequences. Nick, a war vet, hates working for Murray and is devastated when his daughter, Glory, joins up with an antiwar collective in the Middle East. And, for contrast, there is Murray's new wife, Sylvie, who seems to have it all but the author ably shows that appearances often mask a complicated and troubled interior. Gologorsky's first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, won accolades for its luminous prose and remarkable insight into human nature. Her second outing continues those first impressions.
