Frances Garrett Connell

The Stories Frances Garrett Connell

The loss of her parents when Susanna is six, and her adoption and upbringing by a distant relative, leaves her as a stranger to her only sibling, DC, a generation older and separated from her for most of their lives by geography and family secrets. Decades later, confronted with the broken pieces of her elderly brother's legal career and his fatal illness, she struggles to understand who he is, where his life fits in with the never tested version of it she had always thought to be the truth, and what her role must be in conserving his story. The tale moves with the fast-talking, raconteur powers of the brother, from the corrosive and often comically inept courtrooms of Texas from the 50s to the aughts, to the sister's literary and politically -drenched NYC classrooms in 1968 and the heartbreaking incidents she witnesses in her later work with immigrant detention centers, to plummet the meaning of truth, legend and basic humanity.