The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (Contemporary American Fiction)

A National Bestseller

In these beautifully rendered novellas, the writer introduces three women, each of whom tells the story of the lover who most altered her life. In Immaculate Man he is a priest, a virgin at the age of forty-three. In Living at Home he is an Italian war correspondent who wants nothing but her body and the sanctuary of their house – until he is seized by news of another revolution. And in The Rest of Life, he is an intellectual teenager inspired by the Romantic poets to make a suicide pact. He is remembered six decades later by the woman with whom he made the pact. She decided to live.

“Mary Gordon’s fiction is the work of a humane, masterly novelist . . . [whose] great gift is making us care about her people.” – Newsweek

“Each of the three novellas gives us a woman’s love story . . . beautifully written and moving.” – The Boston Globe