Sometimes, individuals and communities seek change. Other times, change is forced upon them, gradually or in what can seem like a sudden turn of events. Either way, the people affected must make choices about next steps, and about what their futures might look like–choices that can have lasting consequences. This smart, sweeping, and emotionally resonant novel explores how and why such choices are made within two fraught marriages, at a time when forces of transformation are at play in the larger community. 

This riveting, perceptive, and richly layered novel explores the lasting effects of trauma, and how it can limit our ability to trust or love. It’s also a compelling mystery story, one that considers the possibility that sometimes, the greatest enigmas are posed by those closest to us.

In these perceptive, richly observed stories, characters arrive at major turning points in their lives through conflicts in relationships or other circumstances, often leading them to a greater understanding of themselves and those close to them. Taken together, the stories offer a layered examination of how people can find ways to live with emotionally complex and difficult situations and, perhaps, imagine new possibilities for themselves.

In the Acknowledgments section of this deeply felt and thoughtfully crafted book, the author, Beth Kephart, writes: “Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News begins with truth. It extends through fiction.” The truth consists of fragmented details of the life of her grandmother, Margaret Finley D’Imperio, who died on October 30, 1969, when Kephart was nine. “She was the great love of my life,” Kephart writes. “She was a mystery.” 

Kephart observes that decades after Margaret’s death, her brother arrived one Thanksgiving with “a box that included a handful of long-lost pages–family genealogy, notes from my mother’s cousin. … My Aunt Miriam’s few spare pages suggest the contours of my grandmother’s life”–for example, her favorite song and her employment at the Fleisher Yarn Company in Philadelphia. Yet at the time of the box’s arrival, so much about Margaret remained unknown, a deficiency that Kephart overcomes, to great effect, in the pages of Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News.

Kephart immerses us in the vividly imagined life of Margaret (known mostly as Peggy in the book) and in scenes from Philadelphia at the time of the First World War, when Peggy was a teenager and at a turning point in her life. In the process, Kephart makes us care deeply about Peggy’s loves, dreams, and fears, creating a work that stands as a profound gesture of love for both her grandmother and the city of Philadelphia.

In the acknowledgments section of this beautifully crafted, revelatory collection, Tara Lynn Masih mentions her realization, while putting the book together, that many of the stories are connected by the theme of disappearance. Indeed, the collection explores literal and metaphorical disappearances, and how these lead characters to transformative discoveries about themselves and, in some cases, about the spiritual world.

This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.