The Man in the Bed

From the author of Discovering the Body ("so sure handed and graceful you might forget it's a murder mystery" -The New York Times Book Review), comes the impassioned drama of a ballet dancer's artistic obsession with her body and a revelation of the ways that harrowing details of four generations of her family created her myth of certain stardom and challenge her to accept new joy and purpose after a devastating loss.

Burning with a temperature one summer night, six-year-old Nikki Mendel is carried to the back yard pond by Grandpa Henry, dead since the end of winter. As cold water breaks her fever, he terrifies her with near drowning. She is left with proof he came back to save her: his pipe tobacco smell, the rasp of his whiskered cheek, a peppermint he left in her hand.

Fifteen years later, Nikki returns home on the eve of change. Her brother Jonas, now thirty, has never moved out. Gabe, a New York actor, shows up the next day. Their mother has summoned them to hear her plan to urge Jonas out on his own by selling the house, a surprise strategy that propels the family's long-suppressed grief into an act of irreversible loss. In the aftermath of tragedy, Nikki throws herself into her dance career, only to suffer a devastating injury. A lifelong dancer, she feels destroyed by the loss of her perfect dancer's body.

Parallel to Nikki's story is the story of Grandpa Henry's double identity, details hidden from her that led to his guarantee she'd be a ballet star - and may have handed down to her through the generations the way she chooses to deal with loss. Their stories intertwine but never touch until she makes a discovery that convinces her she can form a new identity without dance to define her.

The novel asks whether meaning survives when the body fails, whether myth can coexist with truth, and whether faith - in love, in art, or in ghosts - is a form of courage or avoidance.

The Man in the Bed is about inheritance: what we carry, what we lose, and what we choose to live with once old certainties are gone.

Mary Howard's latest novel The Man in the Bed, skillfully propels a reader into the entangled lives of three generations of a midwestern family. Its characters' fates balance on a buried dramatic history of retribution and misunderstanding. They struggle against that inheritance within the limits of their prairie communities, their yearning for a music, literal and figurative, they hope will allow them grace. And it often does - for a while. But what they're after, what we want for them, is beyond music. There are depths here.

Stephen Pett - author of This Impossible Vertical World