Norah, his wife, transforms over that period from a “Suzy Homemaker” to the owner of a success of travel agency. The novel’s protagonist and its most inscrutable, complex character, David Henry is haunted by a past full of poverty, grief, and loss when he makes the painful decision to send away his newborn daughter Phoebe—who has been born with Down syndrome. They’d never really see Phoebe, these men, they would never see her as more than different, slow to speak and to master new things.

David Henry’s decision to give away his Down syndrome-affected daughter Phoebe sparked a national conversation, and the book quickly joined the ranks of popular book-club reads like Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. A finder of lost things, a girl who could count to fifty and dress herself and recite the alphabet, a girl who might struggle to speak but who could read Caroline’s mood in an instant.They were joined together now in something enormous, and no matter what happened they always would be. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter spans a period of 25 years, as the events of the novel begin in 1964 and continue to unfold through 1989. On the other hand, some people make decisions based on memories which are not even real, but have been fed to them externally. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a massive bestseller which lingered for 122 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was included in uncountable book clubs across the country, is in many ways an issues book—a novel which deliberately asks hard questions of its readers, often engaging them in an ethical dilemma and forcing them to confront the choices they might make were they placed in the characters’ shoes.

The story covers the memory as theme from the concept of how it can impact the future course of life to the struggle to define by purposeful forgetting. David lost a sister, June, to heart failure in childhood and, knowing the medical risks associated with Down syndrome, he fears having to watch Phoebe die too.

Decisions in the heat of the moment can be made based on the input of things remembered which actually have little direct significance in that moment. Phoebe was standing next to a poplar tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn, scraping whipped cream off her cake with her fork.

Rumor has it that Kim Edwards got the idea for the stranger-than-fiction premise at the heart of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter from a local pastor who told her a story about a man who, much later in life, discovered he’d had a twin brother with Down syndrome who’d been placed in an institution at birth. The novel is an exploration of the various ways in which women have made progress in being able to choose their own destinies and shape their own identities. Accordingly, David sends Phoebe away with nurse Caroline Gill and constructs a terrible lie, telling everyone that Phoebe died at birth. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. When he imagined the daughter he’d given away, it was his sister’s face he saw, her pale hair, her serious smile.

Stubborn yet sensitive, with a debilitating need to try and fix the past and master the future, David’s individual arc ties in with all of the novel’s major themes. You must be crazy,” Norah said, though even as she spoke so many jagged pieces of her life were falling into place that she knew what Caroline was saying must be true.He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop. No freak blizzard, slightly premature labor or a simple delay of two or three days and everything changes in the lives of these characters. These tulips are so beautiful,” he began, but he was unable to explain himself, unable to put into words why these images compelled him so.