Advance Praise for Resting Places

“This is a beautifully crafted novel of unbearable loss and earned forgiveness. Elizabeth, a middle-aged lawyer, crosses the country in search of her son’s final resting place. Along the way, she uncovers the best and the worst of herself. Michael C. White has wrought a remarkably moving tale of love and redemption.”

—Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife and Rescue

“Resting Places takes readers into that most feared of landscapes: the difficult terrain where a parent must grieve the loss of a child. But Michael C. White is a masterful storyteller and a deft tour guide who interfaces this meditation on sorrow and death with a classic but contemporary quest story. Traveling alongside the author’s complex, sympathetic, but not always likable protagonist as she searched for the meaning of her son’s life and death, I read compulsively and voraciously. Elizabeth Gerlacher is a character I will long remember and Resting Places is a story I will not soon forget.”

—Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

“This is a lovely, searing book. A son dies in a baffling car smashup, and circumstances hint at the even-worse agony of a suicide. With consummate skill and tenderness, Michael C. White follows his parents onto the broken ground of the unbearable hereafter.”

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

“Resting Places is no restful terrain for Elizabeth, the heroine, in White’s deeply soulful and brilliantly mythical novel. It is a masterful summation of all life’s possibilities and its ultimate triumph. The ending made me weep with joy; the grace of this masterful novel still lingers deep inside my soul long after I grudgingly laid this book down.”

—Da Chen, author of Colors of Mountain and My Last Empress

“In Resting Places, Michael C. White takes on that most daunting of challenges: excavating the grief of a mother who has lost her only son. While her husband Zack attends support groups, Elizabeth isolates herself emotionally until a chance encounter of a rainy highway sets her on an unexpected path toward salvation. Haunted by the makeshift roadside crosses commemorating lost souls, Elizabeth searches for answers, and for a resting place of her own. The story is a masterful exploration of the guilt, the anguish, and the mystery of catastrophic loss. Michael C. White is one of our most gifted authors, and he is at his best in this profoundly moving and brilliantly written book.”

—Clint McCown, author of Haints and War Memorials