What The Body Remembers: For The Women who Carried Songs Across Borders They Did Not Choose To Cross, and For The Granddaughters Who Did Not Know They Were Listening - The Loire Valley Series, #2

On a February afternoon in Tours, a stranger on a train platform hands Vivienne Marchetti an envelope.

The envelope is from a man who has been dead for nineteen years. She does not open it for ten months.

By the time she opens it in a kitchen above a bookshop, on a Sunday morning in May, with a woman she is slowly learning to call her friend, Vivienne Marchetti she is no longer the same person who received it. Brain surgery has seen to that. She has come back from the operating table mostly herself, but with something loosened in the architecture of her memory. Something that was, perhaps, always already there, waiting.

The envelope leads to a presbytery in Provence, a wooden box sealed for twenty years, and a small silver christening cup engraved with a name that is not Vivienne's. It leads, further, to the discovery that the lullaby she has been humming since she woke from surgery does not belong to her, not to her conscious life, at any rate. It belongs to a woman who came to a village in the Banat in 1935, carrying a child, and left without either of them.

It leads, finally, to a question about memory that no neurosurgeon at the clinic in Lausanne can quite answer: What does the body carry that the mind has been told to forget?

What the Body Remembers is a novel about inheritance, the kind that travels in lullabies, silver cups, and the faces that return, every fifth or sixth generation, in families that do not know they have been carrying them. It is a novel about a woman coming home to a house that has been waiting for her longer than she has been alive. And it is, quietly, a novel about what a marriage leaves behind when the people in it finally learn to be kind to each other.

For readers of Fredrik Backman, Anne Tyler, Nina George, and Kristin Hannah