You must remember this

Set in 1940s Detroit, this novel follows a sensitive adolescent girl growing up in a striving, working-class Catholic family during the final years of World War II. When a European relative—scarred by the devastation of the Holocaust—enters their household, the family’s fragile sense of order begins to fracture. Through the girl’s awakening consciousness, the story explores memory, repression, sexual and social tensions, and the uneasy collision between American optimism and Old World trauma. Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s most prolific and incisive literary voices, brings psychological depth and moral intensity to this portrait of a family and a nation shadowed by history. A powerful coming-of-age novel, it will appeal to readers drawn to intimate family dramas and explorations of innocence lost.