Forty Summers

At his wife's funeral, seventy-five-year-old Hank Whitfield receives a box of ashes and a letter. Iris, married to him for fifty-three years, has left one last instruction: she knows where she wants to be buried, and trusts him to figure out where, without ever saying it aloud. The trouble is, Hank doesn't know. Hank goes looking, from the mountains to the coast and back to the road where it all began, while his son pushes him toward a smaller life and his daughter quietly begs to help. Along the way, the marriage resurfaces whole: lost letters, a proposal made twice, a hurricane, a decade of illness that stole her in pieces and gave her back in others. Forty Summers is a novel about grief and the kind of love built not in one grand moment but in thousands of small, faithful ones. It asks where a life actually lives once it's over, and answers, quietly: it was never one place. It was every ordinary day, all of them, together.