But when she’s laid off from her reporting job, she finds herself completely at sea…until the day she receives a beautiful, haunting painting of a young woman standing at the edge of a sugarcane field under a violet sky. The new novel from the author of international bestsellers The Sweetness of Forgetting and The Life Intended shows why her books are hailed as “engaging” (People), “absorbing” (Kirkus Reviews) and “enthralling” (Fresh Fiction).Įmily Emerson is used to being alone her dad ran out on the family when she was a just a kid, her mom died when she was seventeen, and her beloved grandmother has just passed away as well. And to reunite two lovers torn apart by terror, all she’ll need is a dash of courage, and the belief that God exists everywhere, even in cake.Įmily thinks she’s lost everything…until a mysterious painting leads her to what she wants most in the world.

Hope’s emotional journey takes her through the bakeries of Paris and three religious traditions, all guided by Mamie’s fairy tales and the sweet tastes of home.Īs Hope pieces together her family’s history, she finds horrific Holocaust stories mixed with powerful testimonies of her family’s will to survive in a world gone mad. And then, arming her with a scrawled list of names, she sends Hope to France to uncover a seventy-year-old mystery. Tantalizingly, she reveals mysterious snippets of a tragic history in Paris. But in a rare moment of clarity, Mamie realizes that unless she tells Hope about the past, the secrets she has held on to for so many years will soon be lost forever. Now, Hope’s beloved French-born grandmother Mamie, who wowed the Cape with her fabulous pastries for more than fifty years, is drifting away into a haze of Alzheimer’s. Her own dreams of becoming a lawyer long gone, she’s running a failing family bakery on Cape Cod and raising a troubled preteen.

She lost her mother to cancer, her husband left her for a twenty-two year old, and her bank account is nearly depleted.

The Sweetness of Forgetting is the book that made Kristin Harmel an international bestseller.At thirty-six, Hope McKenna-Smith is no stranger to bad news. A baker in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, must travel to Paris to uncover a family secret for her dying grandmother-and what she learns may change everything.

Italian for Beginners by Kristin Harmel