Count the Ways: A Novel

In her most ambitious novel to date, Joyce Maynard returns to the themes of family, love, and forgiveness in a mesmerizing story of a fractured family. Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 480 pages
Publication date: 15 September 2022
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that have made her most acclaimed work. This mesmerizing story of a family spans from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives.

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. Eleanor is an artist and writer, while Cam makes wooden bowls. Within four years, they are parents to three children: two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin, and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she has ever wanted: summer nights watching Cam's softball games, snow days by the fire, and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring.

If Eleanor and Cam don't make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more: their family.

Then, a terrible accident occurs, caused by Cam's negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor becomes consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together and often tear them apart. Joyce Maynard traces the course of their lives, from one child's gender transition to another's choice to completely break with her mother. Through this, she captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past and find redemption in its darkest hours.

Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness. It explores the complexities of family relationships, the power of forgiveness, and the resilience of the human spirit. This is a story that will stay with readers long after they have turned the last page.

Weight: 318g
Dimension: 203 x 135 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780062398284