Saturday, August 14 at 12 noon
Kate Ledger is coming!
Kate Ledger grew up in Philadelphia, PA, and graduated from Akiba Hebrew Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Arizona. For several years, she worked as the senior writer at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. As a freelance writer, she has published articles in Self, Health, and other national magazines. She lives in St. Paul with her husband and children.
Simon and Emily look like a couple that has it all. Simon is a respected physician, one of Baltimore's "Top Docs," with a burgeoning private practice. His wife, Emily, shines professionally as a partner in a premier public relations firm. They have a beautiful house and a healthy daughter. But their marriage is scarred by old, hidden wounds. 
Even as Simon tends his patients' ills, and Emily spins away her clients' mistakes, they can't seem to do the same for themselves or their relationship.
Simon becomes convinced he's discovered a cure for chronic pain, a finding that could become the major medical breakthrough of our time. With reckless zeal and obsessive focus, he begins to recruit patients to test the therapy. As he yearns to prove he's a good doctor—and to make amends for a missed diagnosis years ago—he is oblivious to the pain he's causing at home. Emily, still struggling to move beyond the devastating loss she and Simon suffered fifteen years ago, comes to realize she hasn't felt anything for a long time-that is, until a lover from her past reappears and she's forced to examine her marriage anew.
Remedies explores the complicated nature of pain, in the nerves of the body and the longings of the heart. To what lengths would you go to avoid feeling pain? And would you believe in a cure?
Jennifer wrote about Remedies in the January newsletter:
I LOVE this book! It is SO well-written! This is a new author that I am hoping will devote most of her time to writing novels. (This one took ten years to write, I’m not sure I can wait another ten!) The author so unabashedly delves into the consequences of grief left ungrieved. Simon and Emily Bear is a middle-aged couple with one teenage daughter. Prior to the daughter’s birth, the couple had a son who died as an infant. Simon, a doctor, buries himself in work. When Simon thinks he’s found a cure for chronic pain, he becomes so immersed in his work that he teeters dangerously close to the edge of insanity. Emily has repressed her emotions so completely that it is only with the help of a former lover that her stuffed feelings have any chance of airing. This is not a plot-driven story, but if you can fall in love with the beauty of well-written sentences and the incredible evolution the human soul can make, you must read this!
June 25
