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The Cure for Grief

The Cure for Grief
A Novel  
This edition: eBook, 320 pages
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Now available in paperback, “a subtle, elegiac, coming-of-age novel about catastrophe, grief, and the persistence of everyday life. Aa gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival…profound, poetic, and original” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).Ruby is the youngest child in the tightly knit Bronstein family, a sensitive, observant girl who looks up to her three older brothers.

She is especially close to her youngest brother Nathan, always ready to entertain and indulge his sister,
and in awe of her stern but gentle father, a Holocaust survivor whose past and deep sense of morality mystify her. When Ruby is ten, her eldest brother is suddenly taken to the hospital and he emerges as someone she barely recognizes. This is only the first in a startling series of tragedies that befalls the Bronsteins and leaves Ruby reeling from sorrow and disbelief. As Ruby’s family fractures, this disarmingly intimate and candid
novel follows Ruby through the thrills, confusion, and longing of adolescent experience, through her close friendships, early romances, and questioning of faith and identity—until she chooses to reconcile what she has lost with whom she has become. Written in clear-eyed, unsentimental prose, The Cure for Grief is as much about love and the beauty of life as it is about loss.

How did you come to write this book?

I was writing around this book for years. I knew I would someday write some version of it but I didn't know what form it would take. Then in graduate school a teacher diagnosed my stories as all having "damaged males on the side," and I was shocked into beginning the novel in earnest.

Learn more about Nellie Hermann
"The Cure for Grief is a searingly beautiful, stunning debut, saturated in the lyricism of loss and mourning yet rooted in the everyday. The book's sadness is irradiated by a wild hope as the characters take their places among the living; we are drawn in by the force of their sorrow but elevated by their rich and complex attachments to each other, the past, the future, and their own inner lives."
-- Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother
"Written in measured, splendid prose, Nellie Hermann's debut novel is a courageous gift to readers. Far more than a coming-of-age story, The Cure for Grief is both vivid in its immediacy and poignant in its timelessness."
-- Howard Norman, author of Devotion
"The Cure for Grief is a profound and thrilling achievement -- an exemplar of the reason books should be written and read. Nellie Hermann is wise beyond her years, though to say this is to miss the point -- that all great artists float beyond age and outside of time. The Cure for Grief is a coming-of-age story that reaches far beyond its subject; it shimmers with clarity and grace, fulfilling the deepest of literature's promises -- drawing us into a riveting world, punching us with emotion, revealing the most secret truths of the soul. Her vision is that of the seer, whose illuminating beam might help the reader learn how better to live."
-- Shira Nayman, author of Awake in the Dark
"Stunning. A subtle, elegiac coming-of-age novel about catastrophe, grief and the persistence of everyday life. A gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival. Hermann is a young author to watch."
-- Kirkus Reviews, starred review