The House on Eccles Road

It is June 16, 1999 in Dublin, New York, and Molly meanders through her empty day while her husband Leo tends to a strict and busy professor's schedule. On the surface of her thoughts, Molly wonders: Will he remember their anniversary? And how many hints should she give him? As Molly and Leo circle each other throughout the day, Kitchen illuminates the scope of Leo and Molly's life together detail by detail. Molly is offended by the hot June day, hums Irish tunes, considers an old love; Leo thinks about his star pupil, young girls at the tennis court, his dead father. Both, if differently, mourn the loss of their three-year-old son eight years ago.

In this momentous novel, Kitchen weaves these, and other voices into the tapestry of a single day, an ordinary day in the lives of ordinary people, yet a day which, by gathering the threads of all they have been, might change their lives forever. Strange, she was thinking, how we go through our lives on remote control. But as Molly drives home, a quick glance at the fatal car accident, which has slowed traffic to an agonizing crawl, brings Molly to the present moment, at the precipice of life and death.