Notebook of Lost Things - Tapa dura

Helene came to the small town of Paris, New York as a child with her younger brother and her mother, Uta. They were refugees from World War II, survivors of Dresden, who left a DP camp to join a distant relative only to find that he'd vanished. The little family was taken in for the night by William Swick, a bookseller, a shy and lonely man, a dwarf. That one night turns into a lifetime.
Helene now works at the local post office; she is almost too old to have a child, but she tells her lover, Harry, the owner of the village tavern, that she will leave him if he cannot show her that he can rise above the mundane and display the capacity for real love. One night he looks out his window and sees something out of the ordinary, something mysterious, that shakes him out of his self-absorption.
And William Swick loves Uta, loves her still, even after her death.
This is a novel about love and loss, the way that one secret leads to another, the way the surface of ordinary life may, upon closer examination, reveal mystery, and how that mystery affects the lives of five people in a small town and changes them forever.

Megan Staffel teaches writing at Vermont College.