The Truth About Love and Lightning

McBride (The Cougar Club) takes readers on a winding journey to examine the far-reaching implications of dishonesty. It’s 2010 and single mother Gretchen Brink—who gave birth as a teenager to now-39-year-old Abigail—is living quietly in Walnut Ridge, Mo., with her blind twin sisters, Bennie and Trudy, when a violent twister rips through their farm. While assessing the property damage, Gretchen finds an oddly familiar man trapped under a fallen walnut tree—and subsequently sees that the long-barren tree has delivered an abundance of nuts. Is the mystery man the long-missing Sam Winston, who disappeared years earlier from a refugee camp in Africa and who Gretchen claimed is Abigail’s father? At the same time, Abigail is headed home from Chicago with big news of her own: she’s pregnant and soon to become a single mother herself. Abigail is convinced that her father has returned—but how can Gretchen admit that she lied about her daughter’s parentage? In working through that knotty problem, the author also takes a detour into the past, exploring generations that came before in the ’30s, ’50s, and ’70s. Seamlessly toggling between decades, McBride delivers a poignant page-turner with flawed but lovable characters. Agent: Christina Hogrebe, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Feb.)