num_pages: 384
description: “Every now and then a new voice comes along that makes sense of our deep need for stories and their tellers. Lisa Gornick is one of those voices…A Private Sorcery is a wonderfully honest book, deeply felt, with characters carved from the true stuff of what we are. A first-rate novel.”—Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of TransAtlantic and Let the Great World SpinSaul Dubinsky, a sensitive, shy psychiatrist, was living a dual life. Following the attempted suicide of one of his patients, the dedicated young doctor turned to drugs. When he’s arrested on criminal charges, his wife and his father are left to figure out how things went so wrong and why they were blind to the pain of the man they both love.Saul’s emotionally remote wife, Rena, confronts the failures of their marriage and, for the first time, faces her shame about her fatherless, hardscrabble past. Saul’s father, Leonard, who’d long ago given up practicing psychiatry, blames himself for his son’s breakdown. He finds that he can no longer escape the memory of the troubled patient who changed the course of his own career nor deny his complicity in his wife’s illness. As Rena and Leonard each grapple with the impact of Saul’s arrest, they are drawn closer together-and a delicate transformation begins to occur in each of them.This is an immensely satisfying and ultimately triumphant story abouat the precarious balance within a family and about the unconscious ways in which we affect the lives of those we love most. Full of wisdom and insight, A PRIVATE SORCERY marks the debut of a talented writer.
language: English
title: A Private Sorcery
titlecomplete: A Private Sorcery
genres: Fiction
ratings_count: 55
publisher: Algonquin Books