Synopsis
Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature who reads Shakespeare to his four-year-old daughter, Giselle. A native of Trinidad and the product of a strict, English-style education, Justin and his focus on the works of “Dead White Men” receive little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, has begun to pull away from him, both physically and emotionally.
Harlem-born Sally Peters, a mother on the verge of turning forty, is a primary school teacher who believes that joy is a learned skill, and that it takes strength to be happy. After a life of tragic losses, Sally thought she had finally found that strength when she met Justin.
But now, Sally wants something more. And Justin is angered by her uncertainty about their life and frightened by the thought that perhaps Sally never stopped loving the ex-boyfriend for whom she wrote fierce poems. Is he, Justin wonders, responsible for helping Sally find meaning in her life—a life that seems to him most fortunate? If Sally and Justin’s union is to survive, both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.
Set in a snow-covered Brooklyn, Grace is a thoughtful and lovely meditation on trust, redemption, and family. Elizabeth Nunez’s delicate prose brings the struggles, aches, and tender moments of this contemporary urban love story into vivid focus.
The New York Times
In Elizabeth Nunez's latest novel, conflicts arise in apparently tranquil and satisfying lives. Justin Peters, a black Trinidadian with a Harvard Ph.D., has chosen to teach at a small public college in Brooklyn; though he dislikes the extreme Afrocentrism of certain of his colleagues, he manages to survive through some deft maneuvering between the canons. His wife loves him, their 4-year-old daughter, Giselle, and her work at a primary school, but something isn't right. She used to write poems before they met, but now Justin sees her as mired in self-help books and talk shows. ''Are you living exactly where you want to be, Sally?'' he asks. ''Are you doing exactly what you want to do?'' Her inexplicable coldness makes him think she plans to leave him, perhaps for her friend Anna. Meanwhile, his prize student tries to kill himself after discovering that his girlfriend has been seduced by someone he describes as a ''lesbo.'' An important theme in Grace is the defense of the Western classics; diversity, Justin believes, must cast a wider net. He plans to compare Toni Morrison's Sethe, who killed her daughter, to Euripides' Medea, whose motives for killing her children are at least as tangled. After much debate, the curriculum committee approves this line of reasoning. Sally and Justin eventually come to an understanding as well, which might be more believable if he sounded less like a stage parent and more like a friend. — William Ferguson