In this highly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of The Descendants , a grieving mother struggles to overcome her son's death, when a strange girl enters her life with a secret that changes them both forever.
From New York Times bestselling author Kaui Hart Hemmings comes the highly anticipated follow-up to The Descendants .
IN THE IDYLLIC SKI TOWN of Breckenridge, Colorado, Sarah St. John is reeling. Three months ago, her twenty-two-year-old son, Cully, died in an avalanche. Though single, Sarah is hardly alone in her grief. Her father, a retiree, tries to distract her with gadgets from the QVC home shopping channel. Sarah's best friend offers life advice by venting details of her own messy divorce. Even Cully's father reemerges, stirring more emotions and confusion than Sarah needs. Still, Sarah feels she is facing the stages of grief-the anger, the sadness, the letting go-alone.
Barely ready to face the fact she will never again hear the swoosh of her son's ski pants, or watch him skateboard past her window, Sarah is surprised when a strange girl arrives on her doorstep. Unexpected and unexplained, she bears a secret from Cully that could change all of their lives forever.
Kaui Hart Hemmings highlights the subtle poignancies of grief and relationships in this stunning look at people faced with impossible choices in the wake of a tragedy. With the unsentimental and refreshingly wry style famous for presenting trouble in paradise in The Descendants , Hemmings in The Possibilities considers the difficult questions of what we risk to keep our loved ones close.
"Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel is a graceful, subtle primer on freedom-the means by which we free (and forgive) ourselves, our parents, and our children, as well as the almost unbearable getting-of-wisdom by which we free our beloved dead. The Possibilities is familiar to us, in all its wit and intelligence, because we know the characters. We are the characters."
-Susanna Moore, author of The Life of Objects
Kaui Hart Hemmings has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence, and she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, a New York Times bestseller, The Descendants , has been published in twenty-two other countries and is now an Oscar-winning film directed by Alexander Payne and starring George Clooney. She is also the author of a story collection House of Thieves, the novel The Possibilities and the YA novel Juniors . She lives in Hawaii.