Philip Beard

Like Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby, Philip Beard writes insightfully, movingly, and with the lightest touch about the messiness of life. Michael Benedict, overprivileged but undermotivated, seems to have it all: a beautiful wife, two lovely daughters, a law practice, and a natural golf swing. But when his wife announces she's unexpectedly pregnant with their third child, Michael's underwhelming response disturbs the fault lines of both his marriage and his psyche. Seeking solace, Michael turns to his golf game and a kind of sex that isn't exactly extramarital. A deft tightrope walk between heartbreak and hilarity, Lost in the Garden is a novel for anyone who's ever felt life was a work in progress.

Philip Beard’s stunning debut novel is fifteen-year-old Tess DeNunzio’s letter to her sister, Zoe, lost to a hit-and-run driver on a day when it seemed that nothing mattered but the tragedies playing out in New York and Washington. Dear Zoe is a remarkable study of grief, adolescence, and healing with a pitch-perfect narrator who is at once sharp and naive, world- worried and self-centered, funny and heartbreakingly honest. Tess begins her letter to Zoe as a means of figuring out her own life, her place in the world, but the result is a novel of rare power and grace that tells us much about ours. BACKCOVER: “Like The Lovely Bones, [Dear Zoe] is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.”