Love This Day: A Novel

From the bestselling author of Wild Game and Little Monsters, a mesmerizing novel about one woman, her two great loves, and the mysterious ways the past speaks to the present—and the dead to the living.

Helen Beckett—proprietor of the beloved Frigate Books, mother of two grown children, married for thirty-four years to John, a devoted and hardworking man—lives a life of quiet contentment north of San Diego near the family avocado grove. But long-buried memories have begun to surface in her dreams, fragments so vivid they threaten the hard-won solidity of her days.

By day, Helen prepares the guest cottage for her daughter Tig and grandson Charlie, who are returning home from New York City in the wake of their own loss; by night, she tumbles back to when she was young and brimming with passion and adventure, living in Rome and in love with an Irish poet named Harry. A crash on the cliff road to Positano left her with severe injuries and almost no memory of him—and of the young woman she’d been. Now, forty years later, Harry is coming back to her, one piece at a time, and Helen finds herself in the grip of a love story she’d mostly forgotten.

Then Charlie starts repeating words once spoken by Harry, a man he couldn’t possibly have known. Is he simply a precocious child, or is something stranger reaching across the years?

Moving from Southern California to the Amalfi Coast to the Irish countryside, Adrienne Brodeur explores the endurance of love, the corrosive power of secrets, the long reach of grief, and the complicated loyalties of marriage and family. Love This Day is a romantic, achingly beautiful novel that captures the challenge of mourning the life you were denied while exulting in the life you were granted.