Loving the Dead and Gone

Judith Turner-Yamamoto's novel Loving the Dead and Gone launches September 6 from Regal House.

From the Regal House website:

For forty years Aurilla Cutter has tended a clutch of secrets that have turned her mean, and imprinted the lives of her daughter Berta Mae, son-in-law Clayton, and others in her small world. A freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of the passions, needs, and hurts in everyone touched by Aurilla’s hidden past. Clayton’s discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene’s bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton and Berta Mae’s marriage to crisis. When Aurilla learns about the affair, her own memories of longing and infidelity are set loose. Like Darlene’s–unappeased and clung to—they possess an intensity that denies life to the present. As Aurilla’s forbidden and tragic story of love, death, and repeated loss alternates with Darlene’s, the divide of generations and time narrows and collapses, building to the unlikely collision of the two women’s yearnings, which free them both from the past. Loving the Dead and Gone is a lyrical novel about the transformative power of death and how tragedy binds people even more lastingly than passion.