In this literary novel, a minister deals with the reappearance of his secret child.The Rev. David Wilder is a man of God. Married to the same woman for years, he oversees his congregation in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lending his parishioners a hand when they need it and spending his free time fishing in the cool watersof the Quanasee River. But when he gets a letter from a woman claiming to be his long-lost love child, he’s frozen in place,unsure of what to tell his wife, Tallulah, who never knew about the baby and is currently dying of cancer. What’s more, hemade a promise years ago to the infant’s mother, one he never plans to break. The woman who wrote the letter, Molly Westbrook, is a young biology teacher in Georgia.

Raised by adoptive parents, she’s never known much about her origins,and now that she is about to become a mother herself, she’s interested in connecting with her birth father. When Tallulah dies, David is sent into a spiral of memory and regret, refusing to meet with Molly even as she circles closer and closer.

Will the guilt he feels about what happened in the past prevent him from seeing his only child?

Lovett’s prose is elegant and descriptive, as here where David visits his hometown after decades away: “The Spinning Wheel Café looked unchanged. David slowed the car to a crawl and peered out at the café. The red-lettered wooden sign over the entrance gave him an eerie feeling of déjà vu; even the daily specials were still taped to the glass.” The narration shifts effectively between David’s and Molly’s points of view and between the past of the 1960s and the present of the ’90s....the reading experience is a rich one filled with feelings of regret, grief, and longing.An engrossing, well-told tale of a father and daughter separated by decades.--Kirkus Reviews