Grace

by Nancy Allen

In this gripping and poignant tale, Catherine Finley leaves her dream job and the heartbreak of a failed relationship to take a new position closer to her ailing father, Douglas. As the undergraduate dean at Franklin College, she quickly discovers the history of her boss’s sexual abuse. When she becomes his latest victim, she finds herself in conflict with the college’s female president who will do anything to protect its secrets.

Catherine seeks refuge in visits to her father’s shore home, but powerful memories unsettle her. A web of memories reveals Douglas’s meaningful romance in the 1960s with Grace, a pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement, and his disappointment that social justice promised during that turbulent time was never fully realized. Catherine’s professional and personal worlds collide as she discovers the College’s secrets are woven into her father’s story.

Genres: Fiction

348 pages, Paperback

Published June 10, 2021

About the author

Nancy Allen has worked as a college administrator and adjunct professor of English at several colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area and at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently at work on a prequel to Grace. She lives in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Nancy Allen]

Nancy Allen’s warm and evocative novel Grace explores the deceptions—of others, and of the self—that haunt so many human relationships. Both Catherine, the novel’s central character, and her aging father Douglas are in painful retreat from past loves and past mistakes. Even Catherine’s immersion in her career as an academic dean at fictional Franklin College, an institution wracked by its own secrets and scandals, offers no escape. But Allen’s loving depictions of home and place (particularly Douglas’s Victorian home on the New Jersey shore), and of Catherine and Douglas’s shared love of literature (from Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham to the poetry of Rilke and Yeats), offer pleasure and solace to characters and reader alike. Catherine, Douglas, and other characters whose lives are intimately bound with theirs carry on, sustained by devotion to their work and, through that work, to literature, justice, faith, and love.

Joyce Hinnefeld, author of Tell Me Everything, In Hovering Flight, Stranger Here Below, and The Beauty of Their Youth.

[Deni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good