Julie Buxbaum

When tragedy strikes across the ocean, Ellie Lerner drops everything--her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs--to travel to London and pick up the pieces of her best friend Lucy's life. While Lucy's husband, Greg, retreats into himself, his and Lucy's eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, has simply stopped speaking. Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them, so, too, do Lucy's secrets--some big, some small. Peeling back the layers of her friend's life, Ellie is forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she'd hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie's carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life--and the lives of those around her--forever.

With perfect pitch for the humor and heartbreak of everyday life, debut author Julie Buxbaum has fashioned a heroine who will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has loved and lost and loved again. When twenty-nine-year-old Manhattan attorney Emily Haxby ends her happy relationship just as her boyfriend is about to propose, she can't explain to even her closest friends why she did it. But somewhere beneath her independent exterior, Emily knows her breakup with Andrew has less to do with him and more to do with...her. "It's like you get pleasure out of breaking your own heart," her best friend Jess tells her. As the holidays loom and Emily contemplates whether she made a huge mistake, the rest of her world begins to unravel. She's assigned to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit where she must defend the very values she detests by a boss who can't keep his hands to himself... her Grandpa Jack, the person she cares most about in the world, is losing it, while her emotionally distant father has left her to cope alone...and underneath it all, memories of her deceased mother remind her that love doesn't last forever. How this brave young woman finally faces the fears that have long haunted her is the great achievement of this marvelous first novel, written with authority, grace, and wisdom.

When feisty and successful Manhattan attorney Emily Haxby ends her happy relationship just as her boyfriend is on the verge of proposing, she can't explain to herself, let alone her closest friends, why she did it. And whilst Emily contemplates whether she has made a huge mistake, the rest of her world begins to unravel. She is assigned - by a boss who can't keep his hands to himself - to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit where she must defend the very values she detests, and there's something wrong with Grandpa Jack, the person she cares most about in the world... As Emily finally begins to take control of her life and come to terms with issues she didn't even know she had, she realizes that perhaps what she wants has been there all along...