Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards's Memory Keeper's Daughter is a tragic but assuring novel about the birth of two fraternal twins to a Kentucky-based family in the early 1960s. The boy is born healthy and the girl, with Down Syndrome. The husband, who is also an orthopedic surgeon helping deliver because of a snowstorm, instructs the assisting nurse to institutionalize the girl, but tells his wife that it was a stillborn.

In his mind, still struck by the pain from his sister's death at age 12, he wanted to protect his wife from loss and pain. His deceipt leads to one dark thread after another in the subsequent 25 years of their lives.

From a Washington Post review: "The story runs along parallel tracks that don't converge until the very end. The two sets of lives make for a thought-provoking contrast, a study in what really determines a family's happiness.

With a successful, lucrative career, David can give his wife and son everything, except candor. As Edwards points out -- probably too many times -- the effort to conceal what he's done with their daughter poisons the atmosphere of their home with a colorless, odorless gas of deception.

David throws himself into photography, a poignant attempt to freeze perfect moments and crop life just as he wants it. Barred from her husband's heart, Norah turns to alcohol, then to a series of affairs, trying to deaden or distract herself from a sense of loss she can't fully understand."