The Pull

rank Murray is eighty-three now, and the house on the Cape Breton shore has gotten quieter than even grief can explain. Three years after the season chronicled in The Push, his body is narrowing in ways his mind refuses to keep pace with, and his daughter Ann finally does the thing she has been circling for years. She comes home.

The Pull is the third and closing novel in the Rise Again series, and it belongs to Ann as much as it belongs to Frank. Where The Conversation was Frank's grief year and The Push was his reckoning with the man he had been, this book turns to the daughter who carries what's left. Ann steps into the strange, unglamorous work of caregiving: the doctor's appointments, the small negotiations over what Frank can still do for himself, the drawer in the kitchen that nobody has opened since her mother died. Along the way she finds pieces of her mother she never knew to look for, and a father who is, even now, still becoming someone new.

Jean, the AI companion who first appeared as Frank's late-night confidant, is still part of the household, though the conversation has changed shape. So has the question underneath it: not how do you survive losing someone, but how do you carry someone toward the end, with patience, with resentment, with love that shows up disguised as duty.

This is a novel about the ones who stay in the room. It treats aging and dying not as tragedy but as a natural, ordinary, and sometimes even peaceful passage, one that asks something different of the people left standing nearby than sudden loss ever does. Readers of The Conversation and The Push will find the characters they know changed by time, and readers new to the series will find a complete, standalone story about coming home before it's too late.

For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Kent Haruf, and anyone who has ever driven home not knowing exactly what they'd find.