As If Love Were Enough — Anne Fleming

With tenderness and wit, Anne Taylor Fleming returns to the complicated terrain of family life -- love given, wounds inflicted -- in her novel, As If Love Were Enough. When Clare Layton's actress mother leaves her husband and two small daughters to go off with her lover, their picture-perfect Hollywood family is shattered. Gone are the star-studded parties, the photo-op outings to Palm Springs. Father and daughters are left to cope and hang on, but finally Clare's older sister, Louise, also drifts away. Years pass without a word or sighting, and then Louise mysteriously reappears, hoping to enlist Clare in a medical quest to save her oldest, evangelical teenage son. Louise's reappearance plunges Clare back into her childhood in the early 60s and into a reckoning with her current role as single career woman and devoted mistress to a married politico. As Clare works toward a sense of peace and personal redemption, the novel examines religion and politics, forgiveness and reconciliation, and the deep tethers between long-estranged sisters trying to find their way back.