It will make your heart sing.Having just read Elizabeth Berg's sweet, life-affirming book, The Story of Arthur Truluv ( see my review), I dove right into its follow-up, Night of Miracles, rather than wait for the characters to get a little bit foggy. If you’re in need of a story of hope right now, pick up this book. On the surface, it seems rather mundane, but when Berg is finished, the light of Heaven shines all the way through it. A whole universe unfolds in The Story of Arthur Truluv. And I wasn’t ready to give up these characters, so real and kind that I wanted to live in their world a little longer.Īuthor Elizabeth Berg is a genius at taking what’s ordinary and illuminating it so that we can see the dazzle beneath. I had spent the week saturated in news that nearly felled me. As soon as I finished, I started the book again. This book gives us a hero, an eighty-five-year-old hero with so much bravery and tenderness, I think you’ll fall a little bit in love with him. It shows us how spectacular everyone’s life is, no matter who we are, no matter what our circumstances. The Story of Arthur Truluv seems like a simple story that ends happily. And Maddy gets to live in a place where she’s adored.Īs I write this, I know how it sounds. Arthur finds purpose again, helping Maddy navigate her troubled life. Lucille blossoms in a household where she’s needed and wanted. His equally elderly next-door neighbor, Lucille, a loud woman with big opinions and an even bigger heart, joins the two at Arthur’s house, forming a kind of ramshackle family.Īs the story unfurls, so much of what’s broken in each of the three characters gets fixed. Not long after the two meet, Maddy finds herself in need of a place to stay, and Arthur takes her in. Maddy loves Arthur’s devotion to his wife, the way he listens during conversations, the way he seems to weigh what Maddy says as evenly as if she were an adult.Īrthur thinks Maddy could use a true friend, that she’s due a break in life, that she hides her broken heart inside her tough exterior. She is wildly unpopular with her classmates, a condition she attributes to losing her mother when she was only a few weeks old.Īrthur and Maddy become friends. One day, he notices a teen girl named Maddy who comes to the cemetery on her lunch break from school. The cemetery, Arthur thinks, is a palace of stories. As he passes the other graves, he often stops, and when he does, he can hear the stories of those buried there: who they were, what they loved, what did them in.

How their cat, Gordon, is doing, for instance.

Rather, he tells Nola what’s going on at home. Each day at lunchtime, he takes the bus to the cemetery, walks to her plot, and talks to her while he eats his midday meal.Īrthur is not morose. Elizabeth Berg | Random House | 218 pages | $26Īs the novel opens, Arthur Truluv, eighty-five years old, is grieving the loss of his wife, Nola, who died six months before.

The story of arthur truluv synopsis