A Fine Layer of Dust by Barbara Conrey
From the outside, Jake Trenton looks like a man with little reason to complain. He has a successful legal career, a beautiful Vermont home, a wife he loves and a teenage daughter who still wants to be like him. Then his wife, Sophia, decides to become a gestational surrogate.
For Sophia, carrying a baby for Marianne and Adam Barclay is an act of generosity. For Jake, the pregnancy begins stirring up things he has spent years avoiding. The baby is due in June, the month his brother died by suicide, an act that further complicated Jake’s relationship with his emotionally abusive, impossible-to-please father.
In Barbara Conrey’s A Fine Layer of Dust, we witness how Jake’s unresolved grief and the need to prove himself turn into collateral damage.
Not long after Sophia’s decision, Jake is passed over for senior partner, a blow that cuts especially deep because so much of his ambition is tied to earning his father’s approval. From there, Conrey lets the pressure build. Jake becomes angrier, more secretive and increasingly difficult to live with. Then he makes one impulsive decision that changes everything, and several seemingly separate parts of his life suddenly become one big problem. From there, the novel accelerates into a domestic drama of secrets, betrayal and consequences.
Jake is particularly compelling in that Conrey allows him to be both sympathetic and infuriating. He hurts people, lies to himself and keeps making choices that worsen the damage, yet his behavior grows out of an early trauma we feel in our hearts. With every decision, the novel accelerates into a domestic drama of secrets, betrayal and consequences. Sophia and their daughter, Emily, are no less important, particularly as the family begins to grapple with what love, loyalty and forgiveness actually require.
A Fine Layer of Dust is an absorbing read with enough reversals to keep the pages turning and enough emotional weight to make those reversals matter. It turns one family’s carefully ordered life into a compelling examination of what we owe the people we love — and what it takes to face the damage we have done.
The ebook of A Fine Layer of Dust is available at the discounted price of $0.99 through 8/31 on Amazon.
About Barbara Conrey
Barbara Conrey is the USA Today bestselling author of Nowhere Near Goodbye, her debut, published in 2020 by Red Adept Publishing. Her sophomore novel, My Secret to Keep, released in 2022. Barbara is an active member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Women’s National Book Association, and Author Talk Network. She also moderates the online book club for the Facebook Group Bookish Road Trip.
Travel is her passion, along with reading, writing, hiking, and exploring antique shops. Her greatest love is Miss Molly, her rescue beagle. Barbara lives in Pennsylvania, close to family and friends.
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