"The last time we were at the Ritz in Paris I had my fifth miscarriage at breakfast." So opens Loretta Rothschild's emotional novel Finding Grace, firmly planting the story in a land of inestimable wealth and privilege, but also grief and loss. In the first pages, we come to know Honor, a woman with a self-described "relentless yearning" for a second child. Consumed by anxiety around her struggle to conceive, her focus on creating a family of four has come to jeopardize not only her marriage but her relationship with her young daughter, Chloe: "[Even] the fortunate hand I'd been dealt didn't stop my longing for one more baby."

When the first chapter ends in the violent death of Honor and her daughter, it's hard to know what to expect next: A family drama? A reflection on marriage and parenting? An explosive thriller? A love story? A grief story? What Rothschild delivers in the pages that follow is a bit of all of the above, centering on an unexpected--and ethically complicated--new love for Honor's widower, Tom, who's raising their son, born by surrogate, on his own through his deep and unending grief.

Fertility technology--including IVF, egg donation, and surrogacy, all of which are featured here--has expanded at a rapid rate in the first decades of the 21st century. Finding Grace sits squarely within this newly charted territory as Rothschild skillfully peels back the layers not only of Tom's grief following his family's death, but the ever-present bereavement within his marriage as he and Honor attempted to create a family to begin with. The epic scope and emotional range of Finding Grace is impressive for any novelist, let alone a debut author, and is made all the more noteworthy here in Rothschild's choice of narrator: the dead Honor. "All through our marriage, and even more so before, I'd always wanted to know what Tom was truly thinking, and now it seemed I could." There to witness and opine, but unable to interact or influence, Honor joins the reader in watching Tom blunder around the rough edges of his new, undesired life, raging through the birth of his and Honor's son through a surrogate; the care a newborn demands, regardless of situation; the isolation and loneliness that tag along with grief. "The only thing worse than surviving our death was living with it," yet live with it he must.

A few years later, having slowly rebuilt something of a life for himself and his young son, Tom meets Grace: herself familiar with loss, bolstered by a community of widows who offer a "shared vernacular of grief." As he and Grace carefully enter into a romantic relationship, Honor watches over them, both thrilled and horrified--the woman Tom's falling for is not just any woman, but the one Honor had hand-picked right "out of a brochure" as an egg donor for their surrogate.

With curiosity--but not judgment--Rothschild delves into the murky morality raised by this new relationship. Through Honor's omniscient understanding of Tom's behavior, readers witness a complicated family structure emerge. While this exact situation is atypical, the context gives Rothschild fertile ground for exploring the many shapes a family can take, and all that parenting asks of us as individuals and as a community: as birth parents or surrogates, mothers or fathers, stepmothers, grandparents, and the chosen family found in friendship.

"[There] was no such thing as 'just Tom and Grace.' There was no such thing as a life without a past," Honor reflects, with a writer's eye for plot. "[Like] children's books and memoirs, we don't write from the very beginning; one simply chooses a place to start and that becomes the first chapter of the story." But when a character like Tom tries to keep the beginning a secret, hiding from Grace the way their paths crossed before they ever met, the present becomes a "constant rally with hindsight." Tom fumbles about in a self-constructed house of cards, grappling with the choices he's made and "the logistics of his fraudulent existence," unable to see a way forward without losing everything yet again. This frame gives Finding Grace an edge of suspense, as Rothschild builds a novel that hurtles toward a desperate and inevitable conclusion without rushing past the emotions that give the book its heart. Complex and layered, Finding Grace is a stunning debut that is as tense as it is tender, perfectly executed from jarring start to a shocking, emotional finish. Asking more questions than it answers, Rothschild's work will be a darling for book club discussions, though readers will want to be sure to read with an open mind--and tissues nearby. --Kerry McHugh

Loretta Rothschild (photo: Jane Mcleish-Kelsey)

Loretta Rothschild explores themes of fertility, family, grief, loss, and love in her debut novel, Finding Grace (St. Martin's Press, June 10, 2025). A full-time writer, Rothschild divides her time between London, Florence, and Switzerland with her husband and young son.

How do you describe Finding Grace?

That's changed over time as I've become slightly more aware of it. I'd say now that it's an unexpected love story. And that it's about a man who has a child by himself. That begs the question of how? And who?

I sometimes expand that to say it's told from the point of view of his wife, and involves a secret revolving around an egg donor. That also raises questions, which I like, but it doesn't really at all summarize the story. I like to write stories that pose questions, and let readers come to their own conclusions. As opposed to taking a stance, I like to see what the characters do as I write and watch them, see how other characters react to them.

It feels like this would make good book club pick for exactly that reason.

It leaves it to the reader to interpret what that raises for each individual, and I'm sure every [person] will bring something different into reading it. We're a little bit behind in how we navigate this world of fertility; fertility technology accelerated so quickly, and there is no guidebook. We're all learning on the job.

With fiction, you want new ground, new scenarios that you don't feel have already been done. I had it very clear in my head that I had to do this story. I wanted to continue to explore, alongside fertility technology, where science has taken us, and how quickly, and how these things now play a huge role in so many lives. IVF is not new, necessarily, but it's not very old, either.

The novel poses some big questions about parenting in general, about what it asks of us as individuals, families, friends, communities.

The book is really under that umbrella: what it means to parent, and what that means to different people, to be a father, to be a single father--whilst going through the loss of a child and your wife. And then motherhood, and then stepmotherhood--all in one novel.

When I was writing the book, I also wanted to make a very, very clear distinction between the loss of a child and the loss of a spouse. When you lose a spouse, you become a widow or a widower; if you lose a child, you remain a father or a mother. There is no word for that because it's unimaginable. It's not something we ever want to think about, we ever expect. It's almost like not we're not built for it.

I was very protective of that specific form of love. Tom may move forward with his love life, but his second child is no more a replacement for his first than his new partner is a replacement for his wife. I really wanted to make sure that if someone had been through something similar, they felt they had some recognition in this.

So often our cultural tendency toward those grieving is to not mention those who have died, almost like a form of protection; that is very much not the case in Finding Grace.

Often people often say, "I don't want to remind you of that." But people don't forget that they've lost a child or that their wife has died. They don't forget. It's a fact that one moves alongside; sometimes it's right here and sometimes it's over there, but it never goes away. It's part of your story. With Grace and Tom, I knew they could talk in a different way because they both had the experience of tragedy and loss, an understanding of one another.

In a way, it gave so much freedom for these characters to all talk in a way that felt realistic, and believable and wonderful. They have their own vernacular and they are very patient with one another, but they've all also got their own wounds that they want to protect. Tom and Grace are both able to talk to each other about these things, but at the same time, they're both careful with each other because of their experiences.

Could you talk a bit about your decision in selecting the narrator for this novel? To narrate a book about a widower's love story from the perspective of his dead wife.

I was very careful not to mention the word ghost, because it's not really a ghost story. I wrote the whole thing in the third person originally, though the very first chapter was always told in Honor's voice. She was very obviously alive, and then not. I always knew she would die in the first chapter, and that never changed. But in the original draft written in the third person, gosh, I just really missed Honor. I couldn't bear it, to write a whole book about this person and for her to not be in it. Then I realized: I had to write the whole thing again. I needed to tell the whole story from Honor's perspective, I needed to tell it from the dead. It was like a lightbulb moment for me. This is Honor's story; I can't tell it without her. No one can tell this story better than her.

I had to have rules for her, of course. She doesn't feel any emotion, but she does have opinions, and some things she explains to the reader. It's sort of like a chat between the reader and Honor; she is observing while we are observing. She was really good company as I was writing because she told me everything about these people in the book. She was always yapping in my head like, "Oh I wouldn't do it like that." Or, "I'm not doing that." She's very opinionated. When I was writing her, it was so clear when I had to do something. It sounds really strange, but I knew when something's wrong with her. And I knew when something had to be said because it just wouldn't go away.

This all makes me curious about your writing process; it sounds like you were writing with her. Or as her. Does that mean you write without an outline?

I definitely like to outline my books. I love craft. I love following a very clear structure, and I always have the plots laid out in my head. Sometimes they move, but the big stakes always remain. Going into Finding Grace,I knew what would happen. I knew how the book was going to end. I knew how it was going to start. We went on journeys together, me and Honor, but I can't not know where I'm going with both the structure and the plot. --Kerry McHugh