The Push is the second novel in the Rise Again series, following Frank Murray three years after the loss chronicled in The Conversation. The sharpest grief has settled, and in its place has come something harder to name: the long, unguarded look back at who he was before he became a widower. Across a Cape Breton year, Frank returns to the people and choices that shaped him, a marriage, a classroom, thirty-four years of teaching, and the quiet decisions a man makes without noticing he is making them. Told with the same restraint and close attention to daily life that marked the first book, The Push is a novel about memory as a kind of work, and about what it costs, and gives back, to look honestly at a life already lived.
Frank Murray chose to keep going. That was how the first year ended - a decision, made quietly, at a kitchen table in Glace Bay. Now time has passed. The grief has settled into something he can carry. What has risen in its place is harder: the remembering.
When a young neighbour named Ryan walks up Frank's driveway one March afternoon with a decision he hasn't said out loud to anyone, Frank is pulled into a season of looking back - at who he was as a husband, as a father, as the man his daughters left behind. The remembering takes him places the grief never did. Some of what comes back is not the version of himself he wanted to meet again.
The Push is a novel about memory, family, and the slow work of seeing what you did when you still had the chance to do it differently.
Book Two of the Rise Again trilogy.
For readers of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Content note: This novel explores grief, memory, family estrangement, and the reckoning with one's own past. Reader discretion is advised.
