A HIDDEN FATE

A newly married couple confronts a devastating family legacy in Efron’s novel.

Julia never got over losing her mother, who died when Julia was just 14 years old. Now newly married, she and her husband, Matt, are moving back to her hometown of Baltimore for their respective graduate programs, and Julia can’t help but be haunted by memories from her past. (“She lacked the almost reflex optimism she’d observed in most of her friends.”) At first, she doesn’t believe it when she receives a mysterious postcard from a stranger claiming to be her long-lost cousin, but the newly discovered relative soon reveals a devastating family secret: Her mother didn’t die from multiple sclerosis, as her father led her to believe, but from Huntington’s disease, a deadly genetic condition with no cure. Julia struggles to come to terms with her own impending mortality, yet she still holds on to her lifelong dream of becoming a mother. As she and Matt reconnect with her mother’s family, however, they see the debilitating effects of the illness firsthand, and their plans for the future are thrown into disarray. When Julia unexpectedly becomes pregnant, it drives a wedge between the couple as they disagree on how to address the possibility of passing the deadly disease on to a child. This novel hauntingly ruminates on questions of destiny and free will, asking readers whether they would want to know their fate in the face of certain death. Drawing on her own experience as the director of the Huntington’s clinic at Johns Hopkins, Efron imbues Julia and her family with remarkable emotional authenticity, rendering their plight with a compassion that makes the narrative all the more poignant. Although the central conflict occasionally hinges on avoidable miscommunications, the richly drawn characters and the emotional depth of Julia’s journey make for a deeply affecting novel whose moral questions linger long after the story’s end.

An emotionally resonant novel that offers hope in the face of uncertainty.