Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character. By no means is she conventionally "nice", but she will never be forgotten. Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her -- in the Hamptons in the summer of 1958 -- Ruth is only four. Her parents, having suffered the loss of two children before Ruth was born, are still haunted by their memories of these unspeakable deaths; now Ruth's mother is having an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy, while her father sleeping with someone else's wife.

The second window into Ruth's life opens in the fall of 1990, when Ruth is a renowned author -- and an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. Ruth distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.

A Widow for One Year closes in tile autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a widow and a mother. She's about to fall in love for the first time.

Richly comic as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.