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The Book of Secrets: A Novel, by Elizabeth Joy Arnold
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At once a captivating mystery, a love letter to classic literature, and a sharp-eyed examination of marriage, The Book of Secrets is a gripping novel of family, friendship, and the undeniable pull of the past.
After more than twenty years of marriage, Chloe Sinclair comes home one night to find that her husband, Nate, is gone. All he has left behind is a cryptic note explaining that he's returned to their childhood town, a place Chloe never wants to see again.
While trying to reach Nate, Chloe stumbles upon a notebook tucked inside his antique copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Written in code, the pages contain long-buried secrets from their past, and clues to why he went home after all these years. As Chloe struggles to decipher the notebook's hidden messages using novels from their childhood, she revisits the seminal moments of their youth: her days with the enigmatic Sinclair children, all largely sequestered from the rest of the world, the increasingly dangerous games they played to escape their troubled childhoods, and the elaborate plan she and Nate devised, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to break away from his puritanical father. As the reason for Nate's absence comes to light, the truth will forever shatter everything Chloe knows--about her husband, his family, and herself.
Filled with an underlying adoration for the written word, love for the very feel and scent of a book in the hand, and references from novels as diverse as Crime and Punishment and Where the Wild Things Are, The Book of Secrets is a novel for anyone who has ever stayed up late to finish just one more chapter.
Praise for The Book of Secrets
"An exquisite novel . . . As the story wends on, secrets collapse onto each other...The biggest secret is revealed at the end and won't be spoiled here because The Book of Secrets is one of those reasons some of us live to read."--The Star-Ledger
"Tender and transcendent, The Book of Secrets is about the truths we hide, the consequences we face, and the particular comfort we can only find in a good book. Elizabeth Joy Arnold has written a beautiful and haunting ode to the power of words, and how they shape our lives."--Sarah Addison Allen, New York Times bestselling author of The Peach Keeper
"The Book of Secrets plunges the reader into the strange and intense world of the Sinclairs, a family bound and pulled apart by the forces of imagination and religious belief. Through the eyes of Chloe Tyler, trapped in this world since childhood, Arnold paints a fascinating picture of obsession and loss. The Book of Secrets offers a complex meditation on the elusive nature of truth and on the power of secrets."--Henriette Lazaridis Power, author of The Clover House
"This is the beautiful and heart-wrenching story about the secrets that can both hold a marriage together, and drive two people apart. Reading The Book of Secrets is like walking through a dark labyrinth: just when all hope is lost, you step out into sunshine."--Carla Buckley, author of Invisible
Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader's Circle for author chats and more.
- Sales Rank: #774415 in Books
- Published on: 2013-07-02
- Released on: 2013-07-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.90" h x 1.00" w x 5.20" l, .75 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
Review
"An exquisite novel...As the story wends on, secrets collapse onto each other...The biggest secret is revealed at the end and won't be spoiled here because "The Book of Secrets" is one of those reasons some of us live to read."--The Star Ledger
"Elizabeth Joy Arnold's The Book of Secrets plunges the reader into the strange and intense world of the Sinclairs, a family bound and pulled apart by the forces of imagination and religious belief. Through the eyes of Chloe Tyler, trapped in this world since childhood, Arnold paints a fascinating picture of obsession and loss. The Book of Secrets offers a complex meditation on the elusive nature of truth and on the power of secrets."--Henriette Lazaridis Power, author of The Clover House
"This is the beautiful and heart-wrenching story about the secrets that can both hold a marriage together, and drive two people apart. Reading The Book of Secrets is like walking through a dark labyrinth: just when all hope is lost, you step out into sunshine."--Carla Buckley, author of Invisible
"Elizabeth Joy Arnold weaves words seamlessly together to create a rich tapestry of insight into the human conditions of love, marriage and life. Do yourself a favor and read this book; you won't regret it." --Bookreporter
“An exquisite novel . . . The Book of Secrets is one of those reasons some of us live to read.”—The Star-Ledger
“Tender and transcendent, The Book of Secrets is about the truths we hide, the consequences we face, and the particular comfort we can only find in a good book. Elizabeth Joy Arnold has written a beautiful and haunting ode to the power of words, and how they shape our lives.”—Sarah Addison Allen, New York Times bestselling author of The Peach Keeper
“The Book of Secrets plunges the reader into the strange and intense world of the Sinclairs, a family bound and pulled apart by the forces of imagination and religious belief. Through the eyes of Chloe Tyler, trapped in this world since childhood, Arnold paints a fascinating picture of obsession and loss. The Book of Secrets offers a complex meditation on the elusive nature of truth and on the power of secrets.”—Henriette Lazaridis Power, author of The Clover House
“This is the beautiful and heart-wrenching story about the secrets that can both hold a marriage together, and drive two people apart. Reading The Book of Secrets is like walking through a dark labyrinth: just when all hope is lost, you step out into sunshine.”—Carla Buckley, author of Invisible
About the Author
Elizabeth Joy Arnold is the author of The Book of Secrets, When We Were Friends, Pieces of My Sister's Life, and Promise the Moon. She lives with her husband and daughter in Pennington, New Jersey, where she is at work on her next novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Sitting in our bookstore at night, I can hear the stories. Or not hear them so much as feel them: the neat, round softness of Austen with its improbable, inevitable love affairs; the sprawl of Dickens with its meandering threads tying into coincidental knots. All the books have colors and shapes not just from the stories written but from the stories of the authors who’ve done the writing; from Steinbeck’s realism to Murakami’s cubism, a regular art museum of voices.
It’s different from the stores that sell new books, I think, with their splashes and shouts for attention. Because here when I sit at night in the worn armchair by the fireplace, I can also hear the stories of people who’ve held these books. Some of the first editions must have been read by generations; I imagine women in their petticoats and men in breeches looking for escape from sadness or dreariness. The books have seen plagues and wars--back when wars were still romantic--have been read by candlelight and oil-lamp light; it’s all written there in smudges and stains if you just know how to look.
And hidden behind it all? Is our story. Our once upon a time.
So. Once upon a time there was a girl named Chloe who lived virtually alone, in a cottage by the woods. Until her eighth birthday when she woke to find her mother already gone to work, without a good morning, a kiss, a birthday wish. Chloe had been forgotten. So, being a headstrong girl, she gave herself her own birthday present, skipped school for the first time of many, ate Lucky Charms (minus the marshmallows), and then biked out into the neighborhood to explore.
And there at the end of Bayard Lane, playing in the yard of the biggest house in the state, perhaps even the world, were two girls in pastel dresses and a boy in a pressed white shirt. They were the perfect family, too beautiful to be real, and of course the truth was that what Chloe had seen wasn’t actually real at all. But by the time she figured this out she’d already been in love with them for years and it hardly mattered. Because it was here with these magical children in this world so different from her own that Chloe’s real life began. On her eighth birthday, she was born.
Every day she came to play with her new friends as the weeks passed, and then the years. In time she’d marry the boy, give birth to and lose a son, open a store, and begin building an empire. Until the empire began to crumble and the boy grew haunted and disappeared. No fairy tale, no happily ever after; Chloe was alone again.
And in the new silence, the echo of untold stories was deafening.
Secrets. It was one of the ways we were a good match, because Nate loved secrets and I loved his surprises. We both believed one needed to be shocked out of one’s expectations in order to fully feel life.
The bookstore was both a surprise and a shock. He’d bought the house over twenty years before with the money his mother had left him and his advance for the book he’d just published. But I’d had no idea he was even thinking of moving from our apartment until the day he walked me blindfolded to the front door and pulled away the scarf. “Welcome to your new life!” he said.
And there we were in front of a Victorian mansion, all crumbling scalloped shingles and tall windows, two of which were boarded with plywood. It was an aged beauty queen, now with no hair, bunions, and missing teeth, and at first I had no idea what he was implying by bringing me there. We’d talked about opening a store, but only in vague “someday” terms, and one does not surprise one’s wife with houses in the way one might surprise her with roses. Unless one is Nate.
He opened the door and led me through what felt like a thousand walk-in closets, with scarred wooden floors and faded, peeling wallpaper, and an overpowering smell of stale black tea. “We’ll set up the store downstairs,” he said, voice rushed like a kid trying to explain the wonders of a video game or Harry Potter movie to someone he knows is much too old for it. “We’ll line the walls with wooden shelves floor to ceiling, attach sliding wooden ladders. And I realize right now these little nooks look like toilet stalls, but we’ll shelve them too, so finding the books there feels like a discovery, ancient treasures.”
He led me down the front hallway to show where we’d put the cash register, and a “reading room” for customers to page through the rarer books, searching for signs of foxing or bookworm holes. He’d already imagined it in minute detail: the cushy chairs with tufted ottomans, round end tables with green glass lamps, paintings of authors most wouldn’t recognize but that would give the most bookish patrons some self-satisfaction. “Look at that fireplace!” he said. “I think there’s marble under there if we just strip off that paint. We can light fires in the winter and set greenery here in the summer, put velvet armchairs here and here so people feel like they’re actually sitting in someone’s old library.” And then he led me upstairs to show me how we’d build a separate entrance in back, break down walls to turn a bathroom and two of the spare bedrooms into an open kitchen and living area. He made me see it all.
But Nate was a gifted storyteller. “Leave out the parts that people skip,” that’s a quote from Elmore Leonard when asked how he made his novels engaging. And Nate skillfully left out the debt that would take us years to tunnel up from, the months of hand-chapping, back-straining labor, the stink of the chemicals used to strip the floor and walls. The tedium of sanding fifty yards of dentil molding, bleaching out a century’s worth of grout stains and spackling a century’s worth of plaster cracks; Nate didn’t mention any of this, just made me see the magic of his story. And yes the magic was there, under it all. He didn’t lie, just left out some unromantic narrative detail. And in time our house, our bookshop, they did become our fairy tale. His story came mostly true, until the ending.
The note was on the kitchen table. I’d returned after a round of errands and the gym to find the shop unexpectedly closed; it was just six, and on weekdays we stayed open till eight. But I was only vaguely worried. It had been a hard year for both of us, and Nate had been fragile over the past few months, perpetually seeming on the verge of . . . I don’t know what. Breaking down, I guess, although those words sound way too simplistic and cliché. What do you call being perpetually on a knife’s edge? Feeling like your body has crystallized, so that something as innocuous as a “Do I know you from somewhere?” from a stranger who’s seen your story on the news can shatter you into sharp, serrated splinters? I’m a woman who loves words, but there are times there are no words.
Maybe Nate had just needed to get away, lie down and immerse himself in a book or the National Geographic channel, someone else’s world. And seeing the store closed, I thought I might have just the remedy.
We’d gotten a FedEx that morning, the first American edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: octavo, red cloth and gilt edges, original dark green endpapers, meant for a Mr. Ernie Howell, who’d requested it for his ten-year-old granddaughter. Its pages were yellowed and stained, its spine sunned and frayed. And his granddaughter would probably think it was gross, thanking him politely before stowing the book in a back corner, having no concept of its true value. Ninety-five hundred dollars plus tax, to be exact. The cost of history, but to me putting a price on history felt crass.
We’d read the story together as children: me, Grace, Cecilia, and Nate on the Sinclairs’ brocade sofa, hanging off Mrs. Sinclair’s shoulders so we could see sketches of the hookah-smoking caterpillar and Cheshire cat teeth. And now for the few days the book was ours, Nate and I would sit together, turning pages and remembering.
On my walk home I’d been listening to my iPod, the Beatles, and thinking of how we’d spend the night, I was tempted to dance to the music. I would’ve danced if there’d been nobody around to see, but instead I just walked to the rhythm, adding extra steps where warranted, tiny hops on my toes. Almost happy. Tonight we’d congratulate each other over wine for our find, and maybe then we’d make love; it had been a long time. A very, very, very long time.
But Nate was gone. And in his place, seventy-four words.
Someone, I don’t remember who, said that life is like a beautiful melody with messed up lyrics. I never really understood that until just now. Something’s happened very suddenly, something truly “messed up,” and I need to go back to Redbridge tonight. I tried to call your cell but it must’ve been off. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. It may be awhile, but I’ll call as soon as I know more.
--N
And that was it. At the time, I didn’t even wonder about how strangely it was written, the clipped sentences, the quote he’d chosen to explain his leaving or the vagueness of the word “awhile.” The only thing that had scared me was his return to Redbridge.
It was the town where I’d spent the first twenty years of my life, and so you’d think I should have twenty years’ worth of memories, as many good as bad. But instead all I could see was the nightmare of those last few weeks, a movie on an infinite loop perpetually goring and twisting. I tried not to let myself drift back further to life with Gabriel, the memories like slashes: watching him learn to walk by staggering between library shelves; at the park throwing a ball two-handed that inevitably ended up behind him, wearing a look of bewilderment followed by self-congratulatory applause. Even the places Gabriel had never been part of, like the front steps of the grammar school, or twisting trails through the Redwoods, were places I’d imagined taking him someday. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing them again, knowing I never would.
We hadn’t been back since my mother’s funeral, and even then we hadn’t gone to the Sinclairs’ home, where his sister Cecilia, and now Nate’s father, lived. We talked to Cecilia every month or so, got updates on the meandering threads of her gratingly uneventful life. But Nate hadn’t seen his father for almost twenty-five years. Was one of them sick? Well that must be it, what else could it be? But then why hadn’t Nate just written that in his note?
It wasn’t till after I’d taken a shower that I thought to check my messages to see if he’d given more details and listen to the tone of his voice, make sure he sounded like he’d be okay. But although he’d said my phone had been off, I found it was actually still on, no messages. And when I checked missed calls to get a sense of when he’d left, it turned out there hadn’t been any. He hadn’t tried to call me.
And why not? Despite everything, we were still each other’s stabilizing force. Something happened to set one of us off balance, and we needed the other to get back on steady ground. Had things between us really changed so much?
No, he must’ve dialed a wrong number without realizing, left a message on someone else’s phone. And as soon as the thought solidified in my brain I grabbed onto it, became sure that it was true.
Because I was still living inside the fairy-tale shell he’d constructed to safeguard his secrets. Yes, Nate was a gifted storyteller.
Once upon a time there was a young man who’d loved a girl so deeply, so truly, that he left his family to be with her. Defying the wrath of his father and the imprudence of commitment at such a young age, they held hands and made a vow of forever. And they lived happily, or at least as happily as possible considering the circumstances. Until, they did not.
It started last Christmas. We had a number of odd traditions, me and Nate, the way I’m sure most couples do after years together. The bizarre Buddha bobble-head doll a customer had left in the shop, which we periodically, randomly, hid in places we knew the other would find him. The way, when eating potato chips, Nate would silently hand me each folded chip he found like it contained a secret love note. And then there was our Christmas Eve marshmallow fight. It had started fifteen years ago when I teased him about the string of toasted marshmallow hanging from his chin, the way he couldn’t eat anything gooey, pizza cheese or caramel sauce, without leaving a strand of it dangling from his face like a strange, lone whisker. He responded by pelting a marshmallow at me, so of course I’d pelted one back, and soon the living room was littered with them. Since then, every Christmas we bought marshmallows to roast in our fireplace and to throw, laughing like adolescents, often ending the night by making love amidst the sticky ruins.
But last year Nate had been preoccupied, in one of the moods that hit him sometimes where he seemed scraped raw, everything on the surface. Usually these moods only last a day or two, but this time he’d been edgy for almost two weeks. So to lighten the mood, after studying the burn marks on the marshmallow at the end of my tongs, I’d held it up for him to see. “It’s Jesus’s face!” I said.
He’d forced a smile, then squashed the marshmallow between his thumb and forefinger and studied it. “Now it’s a sheep.”
“We could’ve made a fortune off that, you jerk, eBayed it or kept it in a bell jar and charged admission.”
To which he’d responded, “Joel’s getting out of jail this week.”
I’d stared at him silently, a fist knuckling against my ribs.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to tell you. I mean I realize this wasn’t the right way, but I thought you should know.”
“How?” My voice was pitched too high. “I don’t get it. How could they let him out?”
“He had twenty-five years to life, Chloe, and it’s been twenty-five years. He’s going back home.”
“But . . . Cecilia’s in your home. You mean he’s staying with Cecilia?”
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best novels I have read in years!
By Amy Wallace
What a novel! From the first few pages I was hooked. Perhaps it's because the main character owns a used and collectible book store, which has always been a dream of mine. Or perhaps it's because of the way the novel is written that brings the reader directly into a story and makes them feel like they ARE the main character. For whatever reason, this book grabbed me from the get go.
The plot: Once upon a time there was a woman who owned a bookstore with her husband. One day she wakes up and finds him gone. He didn't take his cell phone, coat or even leave a note. The woman and her husband had been having some marital problems, but it doesn't explain his mysterious absence. She begins to try and unravel his secrets, notes written in code that require certain books to decipher. Discovering that her husband's past has come back to haunt him, she delves deeper into her own past and his to try and uncover the secrets hiding there.
As the story unfolds, the reader discovers more and more about the main character's childhood, which is intriguing. Childhood books play a big part in the story, books such as the Narnia books, Robinson Caruso, Alice in Wonderland, etc. The authors knowledge of books is apparent throughout the story, mentioning a variety of great books that are all on my bookshelf.
It has been a long time since I have read a book I enjoyed as much as this one. If you are looking for a great book to transport you away from real life, this is perfect. Mystery, secrets, books, this book has it all. I cannot recommend more highly. Now I have to find out what other books this author has written. This book is a new favorite!
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
... Read in 2014 The Book of Secrets by Elizabeth Joy Arnold I finished this book just now and am ...
By Melissa A. Palmer
Book #64 Read in 2014
The Book of Secrets by Elizabeth Joy Arnold
I finished this book just now and am wondering how much can one family go through and live to tell the tale? Chloe and Nate were childhood sweethearts...Nate from a ultra-religious family; Chloe's mother was a teenager who became pregnant. Chloe becomes a part of Nate's family...as long as their scary father isn't home...and they exposure her to books and reading. Chloe tries to not expose them to the realities outside of their safe haven home. Worlds collide when 18 year old Chloe becomes pregnant with Nate's child. Obstacles are thrown at them constantly.
At the start of the book, adult Chloe and Nate are having marital problems and Nate has returned back to their hometown. He did not share details of why with Chloe. She uncovers a notebook that he has been keeping in code and begins to decipher the code and Nate's feelings. Chloe follows him back to their hometown.
I enjoyed Arnold's writing style and the way she wove books into the story. Her characters were flawed but interesting. I wanted to keep reading to find out what happened to them. All in all, a very good read.
http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Great read - sticks with you
By Leslie F.
I loved reading this book, and I think that any fan of books (the kind of person who loves to surround themselves with books and considers books their friends) will like this book. Its a dramatic and mysterious story about a family raised in the church and away from the real world by their Pentacostal pastor father, and the girl that is so enchanted with the children and becomes part of their life. Its a story that shows that things are not always what they seem, and life does not always take you where you wanted to go. Books are a big part of this story, as the children bond together over books they read, and one character eventually becomes an author.
This story was one of those that sticks with you because of its tragic beauty.
See all 120 customer reviews...
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