WHILE I WAS GONE

How much of who we were determines who we are? What risks are we willing to take to revisit the past, to rediscover it, to understand it? For a loving wife and mother at the crossroads of her life, the answers could endanger everything she holds dear…

With a successful New England veterinary practice and a loving marriage to Daniel (Bill Smitrovich, Independence Day), the local minister, Jo Beckett (Emmy and Golden Globe winner Kirstie Alley, Cheers) is secure and happy. Yet underneath, there’s an increasing restlessness and discontent, a curiosity about the path her life could have taken had she made different choices. Perhaps it’s the nothing-to-lose independence of their daughter Cass (Janaya Stephens, Inside the Osmonds), lead singer for a rock back, that makes Jo long for her own free-spirited youth—or maybe it’s the unexpected appearance of Eli Mayhew (Peter Horton, From the Earth to the Moon), her old housemate from a Cambridge cooperative during the radical sixties.

Though Eli has settled into a quiet and happily married life himself, his return is as tantalising to Jo as it is unsettling. Besieged by guilt, she is still drawn to Eli and seduced by the possibility of an affair. But what begins with a flirtation ends with an unexpected revelation by Eli. In divulging a terrible secret about a long-ago night in Cambridge, which ended in a shocking crime, he not only shatters Jo’s illusions about her youth, but also threatens the very foundation of her marriage and her future. In her need to be forgiven and her desperate fear of being exposed, how far is Jo willing to go to save the life she loves?

Based on Sue Miller’s New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club® selection, While I Was Gone beautifully examines the trials of faith and family, the tenuousness of even the strongest ties, and the terrible ease in which they can be broken.