The Writing on the Wall

When Vera decides to travel to an old house in the New England countryside for a month-long escape from some devastating news about her daughter, Cassie, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. It begins innocently enough--peeling the old wallpaper from the walls as a favor to the house''s owner. What she discovers underneath--written in India ink on the very walls of the house by a woman named Beth, in 1919--is the beginning of the reader''s unsettling crossing into the unknown world underneath the paper.

The Writing on the Wall is a brilliantly realized journey into the connected lives of three women whose stories span a century, linked by the house they all briefly inhabit, and by the tragedies they''ve had to endure. And it''s not just their own stories that reveal themselves. A brilliant schoolteacher, back from the war in the trenches, finds the pupils of his dreams. A young Vietnam draftee makes a stubbornly quirky separate peace. The moody, dangerously charismatic leader of a commune becomes the unlikeliest of heroes. An "ordinary" housewife''s lonely battle propels her onto the national stage. A girl sent to Iraq tries making sense of the chaos and the pain.

The Writing on the Wall is about stories that can''t be told, but must be told--about secrets that can''t be shared, but must be shared--and the surprising ways people find to confront the truth.

W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, story writer, and essayist who has published more than twenty books. His World War I novel, A Century of November, was published to wide acclaim, praised as ＂ a small classic of language and emotion＂ (San Francisco Chronicle). Wetherell has published four previous books from Skyhorse/Arcade, including Summer of the Bass, On Admiration, Soccer Dad, and his latest novel, The Writing on the Wall. He resides in Lyme Center, New Hampshire.