Stop Here

“Unflinching, piercing, Gologorsky looks straight into the face of class in this country, capturing the reverberations across generations of who really fights our wars, who really serves our coffee, who really gets up in the dark to wipe the diners' counter clean. This book is filled with an array of characters whose bravery is unsung, women who persevere with a dignity unseen by many, until Gologorsky pulls the curtain back and allows us in.”—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

Ava, Mila, and Rosalyn all work at Murray's Diner in Long Island. They are friends and coworkers struggling to hold together their disordered lives. While Ava privately grieves the loss of her husband in the first Iraq War, Mila struggles to dissuade her seventeen-year-old daughter from enlisting in the second. Rosalyn works as an escort by night until love and illness conspire to disrupt the tenuous balance she'd found and the past she'd kept at a safe distance. The promise of a new relationship with a coworker soon begins to restore Ava's faith in her own ability to feel, and Mila learns through wrenching loss that children must learn from their own mistakes. But ultimately it is love–for one another and for their wayward families–that sustains them through the pain and uncertainty of a world with no easy answers.

With tender, unadorned prose and a supremely human sympathy for the triumphs and defeats of everyday life, in this long-awaited second novel Beverly Gologorsky delivers a moving and incisive story about loss, friendship, and healing in the shadow of a seemingly endless war.

BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY is the author of the acclaimed novel The Things We Do to Make it Home, originally published by Random House in 1999, reissued by Seven Stories in 2009, named a Notable Book by the New York Times, Best Fiction by Los Angeles Times, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award. Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, including the New York Times, Newsweek,The Nation, and the LA Times. Former editor of two political journals, Viet-Report and Leviathan, she is acknowledged in the publication Feminists Who Changed America. She lives in New York and Maine.