The story of a woman's search for her brother's lost son, orphaned in the wake of his sudden death, drives Scott Lasser's riveting new novel--a work of stunning economy and momentum about a woman's quest and a family's longing for wholeness and completion.

Cat is a single mother living in Detroit when her brother is killed in New York, and she sets off in search of his child. Her search is still under way when she gets a call from her father. Sam is eighty and carrying the weight of a secret he has kept from her all her life. He asks Cat to visit him in California, intending to make his peace.

Cat's journey--toward her father, and her brother's infant son--and Sam's journey toward his daughter, his lost son, and a new relationship to both his future and his past are woven into this superbly realized novel about families and the mysteries and ambiguities that inhere in our most primal relations. The result is a deeply stirring work that explores the complexities of home and heritage, and the bonds that even death is powerless to diminish.

From the Hardcover edition.

II'm dead, Sam thinks. Simple as that.

For months they'd been warned of kamikaze attacks and, initially, nothing happened. Then one day he ran down from the bridge, heard the batteries open fire and the whine of an approaching plane. He saw it, recognized the charcoal silhouette against the milky sky. A Zero. It came in low, its wings toggling through the antiaircraft blasts till it veered and disappeared behind the starboard railing.

He wakes and looks about, at the bare walls of his bedroom, then grabs a fistful of sheet and takes a moment to get his bearings. A dream. The dream. The same damn dream these fifty-seven years, the memory burned so deep that most nights his mind can't avoid it. Always he wakes terrified, but comforted, too. There's the terror, but it's the same terror.

Sam sits up, playing out the history, a memory now, a waking dream and just as real. He came to on a hospital ship. He learned that the Japanese pilot missed his destroyer but crashed into the sea close enough to shake the ship like a bath toy. Twelve men went overboard; five were rescued. Sam stayed on deck, but cracked two vertebrae. For eleven weeks he lay paralyzed. I'm dead, he thought again. Back home, in a VA hospital in Detroit, the doctors fused the two vertebrae together, and most of the rest. Six days after the operation, he regained feeling. In that moment, when he realized that the world would come back to him, he felt dizzy, weightless, not a person at all. Life now seemed a surprise, an unopened gift. Soon he could walk, but with limitations; his back was rigid as a two-by-four, his neck so stiff that he could only look straight ahead. For this the navy would send him a small monthly disability check. How odd, Sam thought. One moment you're dead, the next you have income for life.

He will see the rabbi in two hours, so he shaves, a two-part process, first with the cream and blade, then, once his face has had a chance to dry, with the electric razor, which makes that odd hum when it finds a patch of whiskers he missed with the blade. He's seen old men who shave themselves badly, leaving sloppy patches of gray stubble, signs of incompetence or--even worse--apathy. It's the little things that matter now, the small acts of defiance that bring dignity in the face of all the deterioration. He has decided that if there's any meaning to life, it's to be found in the daily struggles.

Two squirrels are bickering outside his window, making a racket that could be mistaken for birds. Daily struggles. They know it, too.

He dresses in a dark suit, funereal as fits the occasion, and slips his dog tags into his pants pocket. He likes the feeling of them there, like loose change; if he ever drops over dead, they'll know exactly who he is.

His son soon will have been dead for one year, and Sam wants to recognize this, as per the Jewish tradition. He has no others. That Kyle has been taken from him, that he simply disappeared--this is something that no father should endure. He understands now the look his own father gave him when Sam shipped off to war, and also why he looked away when Sam came back, paralyzed, weighing 126 pounds. The suffering of a child is horrible; of one's own it is unthinkable. And so Sam has turned to his faith, though he doubts he has ever truly believed, even when he lay in that hospital bed and didn't know if he would move again, or again almost fifty years later when they cut his chest open. Faith has always eluded him. The rituals of faith, though, may still prove useful.

He drives to the temple, navigating his Lincoln down the bright streets, at one point catching a glimpse of the denim-colored Pacific....

 

"Scott Lasser's succinct writing underscores the quiet emotional intensity of The Year That Followshis tender novel about the powerful, complicated ties of family. . . . A moving but remarkably unsentimental story."

 

"There are few books this reviewer is compelled to finish in one sitting, and this was one of them."

 

"Getting to know Lasser's complex and affecting characters is a profound pleasure, as is his radiant understanding of intimate relationships between parents and children and men and women. The strong, sure current of his magnetizing prose delivers one stunning revelation after another in this sinuous tale of biology-leaping familial connections. Every rinsed-clear sentence carries the unbearable tension of fear-laced hope as Cat struggles toward forgiveness and love, and Sam accepts the painful but affirming collision of loss and joy. "

 

"A taut, masterfully controlled and profoundly moving novel. . . . A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn't ring true."

 

"I couldn't put Scott Lasser's The Year that Follows down. The characters were vivid, and the drama moving. One of the great gifts of the book is that it brings to life a haunting story in a way that is thoroughly uplifting. One of the best novels about loss I've ever read."

 

"The Year that Follows introduces readers to a cast of flawed, good people struggling to mine meaning from the tragic loss of 9/11 as, step by tentative step, they move toward an altered future. Scott Lasser's life affirming novel is stirring, poignant, and quietly profound."

 

Scott Lasser is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the Wharton School. His novels include Battle Creek and All I Could Get. A native of Detroit, he lives with his family in Aspen, Colorado.

From the Hardcover...