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How It Ends

How It Ends
This edition: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
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Description


Following her stunning and critically acclaimed novels Such a Pretty Girl and Leftovers, Laura Wiess crafts a riveting and emotionally powerful tale of beauty, destruction...and love.

Seventeen-year-old Hanna has been in love with Seth for as long as she can remember, but now that she and Seth are in an actual relationship, love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Seth is controlling and all they seem to do anymore is fight. If that’s what love is, Hanna doesn’t want any part of it. Besides, she has something else on her mind: graduation. But she’s been ignoring the school’s community service requirement, and now she needs to rack up some hours in a hurry.

Hanna volunteers as a caretaker for her neighbor Mrs. Schoenmaker—an elderly woman with advanced Parkinson’s whose husband can’t always be there to watch over her. While caring for Mrs. S., Hanna becomes mesmerized by an audiobook that the older woman is listening to, a love story of passion, sacrifice, and complete devotion. She’s fascinated by the idea that love like that really exists, and slowly, the story begins to change her. But what Hanna doesn’t know is that the story she’s listening to is not fiction—and that Mrs. Schoenmaker and her husband’s devotion to each other is about to reach its shattering, irrevocable conclusion....

Spellbinding, timeless, and achingly poignant, How It Ends is a story of how love ends, how it begins, and how people and events have the ability to change who we are without our even realizing it.

How did you come to write this book?

How It Ends grew out of some haunting, unanswered questions and two completely separate, very disturbing images I've had tucked away in the back of my mind for years.



The unanswered questions were born as a result of several people who were dear to me passing away and me realizing -- after it was too late, of course -- that there were so many things I'd never asked them, stories only they knew that I should have taken the time to listen to and mostly, odd fragments of info discovered after their deaths that couldn't be resolved and will now always remain mysteries.



I started wondering about life stories, how each one of us has one that isn't apparent at first glance, what we tell the world about ourselves and what we deliberately tuck away and never reveal.



And of how we never really know someone, no matter how much we want to believe that we do.



I also wanted to explore how love begins, and how it ends, and what comes of each experience. I think everything that happens to us both teaches us something about ourselves -- what we accept, what we reject, what we're willing to trade and what we're not -- and shapes us for what comes next. The imprints -- both good and bad -- that we leave on each other -- often without meaning to -- and how we go on to translate them fascinates me no end.

Learn more about Laura Wiess