Draw Near To Me
Turner Publishing/Keylight Books
In this highly-anticipated sequel to Swimming with Ghosts, the discovery of a desperately-hidden secret brings a family to the brink of collapse—the exact place where they may ultimately find true healing and forgiveness. One day before a freak accident lands devoted wife and mother Kristy Weinstein in a coma, her husband, David, discovers a devastating secret she’d been keeping for months.
While Kristy’s life hangs in the balance, broken-hearted David, a high-risk OB with a God complex, must grapple with his pride and demons in order to make impossible decisions about his career, wife, and the new baby that has served as a joyful family distraction from the roiling tensions of Kristy’s betrayal. Their college-aged daughter Mia, nicknamed “Scoop,” clashes with her family as she tries to solve the mystery of the events leading up to her mother’s coma, and Patrick, Kristy’s half-brother, fights to hold on to his sobriety and his beloved fiancée while he nearly crumbles under the fear of losing his sister and the responsibility of showing up for Kristy’s family.
With Kristy increasingly unavailable to them, each family member is pushed to find kinship in surprising places and to heal old wounds by drawing near those who have damaged them the most. This is a timely story about the emotional and spiritual work it takes to repair an impossible rupture in a marriage, a relationship, a family, and in turn the larger communities in which we live, hope, and love.
PRAISE
"Draw Near to Me starts as a crackling domestic drama and deepens into something stranger, braver, and beautifully unexpected. Michelle Brafman has an uncanny talent for seeing right into the tenderest parts of a family—its addictions, its loyalties, its blind spots, its stubborn hope. This novel knocked me flat." —Adrienne Brodeur, best-selling author of Little Monsters and Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
"I tore through this book! Should family secrets stay secret? How much are we each willing to forgive? Michelle Brafman handles a complicated, flawed family in Draw Near to Me with a masterful compassion and honesty. An astonishing tour de force!" —Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of American Ending and Man Alive!
"As soon as I put down Michelle Brafman’s Swimming with Ghosts, I wanted to find out what happened next, particularly to Kristy Weinstein, whose compulsions had coaxed her across pretty much every uncrossable line. But the companion novel, Draw Near to Me, delivers so much more than an update on the unwise and unwell characters Brafman has made us care about. It shows how grace is a choice that can begin to heal even the deepest betrayals." —Melinda Henneberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist