Something True

Vera is fifty-four, very good at her job, and quietly seething that this is what she has to show for it.

Tomorrow is her last day at the company where she has spent eleven years being the person who knows where everything is and how to fix it. She has no plan. She has a blank document that starts with I want to write something true, a patio table set for six in a house where she is the only regular guest, and seven years invested in a man who adores her but still can't choose her.

Then a health scare finishes off her patience for a life that only looks good in photos. What Vera does next surprises everyone, including herself: the bookshop she keeps circling like a stray, the old friends she finally tells the truth to, the young mentee who clocks her at the exact moment she's trying to disappear, and a letter from her younger self, stashed away for decades, asking the one question she's spent her entire adult life dodging.

Wry, tender, and devastating, Something True is a novel about starting over after fifty. It's about telling the truth to the people who remember your worst haircut, and finally to yourself. And it's about the gap between being adored and being chosen.

The quiet fury. The quiet book. The woman nobody heard until she wrote it down.

For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Katherine Heiny, and Catherine Newman.