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    Those We Love Most
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    Those We Love Most
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    Those We Love Most
    Audiobook11 hours

    Those We Love Most

    Written by Lee Woodruff

    Narrated by Karen White

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Lee Woodruff knows how to get to the heart of the matter on every occasion."
    --Alice Hoffman


    A bright June day. A split-second distraction. A family forever changed.


    Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.


    Maura must learn to move forward with the weight of grief and the crushing guilt of an unforgivable secret. Pete senses a gap growing between him and his wife but finds it easier to escape to the bar with his friends than face the flaws in his marriage.


    Meanwhile, Maura's parents are dealing with the fault lines in their own marriage. Charismatic Roger, who at sixty-five, is still chasing the next business deal and Margaret, a pragmatic and proud homemaker, have been married for four decades, seemingly happily. But the truth is more complicated. Like Maura, Roger has secrets of his own and when his deceptions and weaknesses are exposed, Margaret's love and loyalty face the ultimate test.


    Those We Love Most chronicles how these unforgettable characters confront their choices, examine their mistakes, fight for their most valuable relationships, and ultimately find their way back to each other. It takes us deep into the heart of what makes families and marriages tick and explores a fundamental question: when the ties that bind us to those we love are strained or broken, how do we pick up the pieces?


    Deeply penetrating and brimming with emotional insight, this engrossing family drama heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.


    Praise for Those We Love Most:


    "Lee Woodruff has written a beautiful, humorous, poignant page-turner about the complexities of love and marriage, tricky family dynamics, and the power of the human heart. Everything you want in a great read is here, including wonderful storytelling that builds to a satisfying ending. Loved it."
    --Adriana Trigiani


    "Those We Love Most is an engrossing story about family fragility, rupture, and redemption. Woodruff's beautiful and unflinching portrayal of the grief, betrayal, guilt, tenacity, and love that engulf this family in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy will keep you turning pages till the end."
    --Sue Monk Kidd


    "Flawless, breathtaking, and oh-so-real, Those We Love Most is a beautifully written book about family, love, betrayal, forgiveness, and how we pick up the pieces in the wake of unthinkable tragedy. When I turned the last page, I found myself missing the characters already. I can't recommend this book highly enough. "
    --Harlan Coben


    "Those We Love Most is a poignant, heartwarming story that follows you beyond its pages. Woodruff skillfully makes the Corrigan family real--fallible and vulnerable, ultimately strengthened by the undeniable power of love. I grieved and cheered for them all, and finished the book with a big smile on my face."
    --Catherine Coulter


    "I opened Those We Love Most when my plane took off from Boston, and didn't look up again until I landed in Miami. In between, I cried and smiled and nodded, and turned pages faster and faster. It's one of those novels."
    --Ann Hood

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateNov 5, 2013
    ISBN9781478928003
    Unavailable
    Those We Love Most

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    Reviews for Those We Love Most

    3.5/5

    38 ratings9 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Just not paying attention for a minute and a tragedy can occur. This story is about the aftermath of grief caused by that minute.
    • 4/5
      Author: Lee WoodruffPublished by: HyperionAge Recommended: AdultReviewed By: Arlena DeanBook Blog For: GMTARating: 4Review:"Those We Love Most" by Lee Woodruff was really a powerful read. This was a read of tragedy not just for one family but a extended family. This was a very realistic read that could happen to any of us...a death of a child. Yes, this novel will be of 'loss, grief, love and two families who are really suffering from it all. We find the mother had been having a affair, while the father was a alcoholic....and the grandfather who was having a affair with the grandma seemed to just take it in as a martyr...What a group of people...Will there be any change? This author did a wonderful job with his detailed dialogue showing much compassion. Who knew that this child's death(James) would charge everything for this family.. breaking them apart but putting them back together again? I found the characters all interesting in that even at the end I am not sure there would be a change for Maura, Roger, Roger,Margaret ...or Julia. Kinda leaves you wondering long after the read. Did I find "Those We Love Most" a page turner?...Yes...it was a dramatic experience to read. Would I recommend....YES!
    • 3/5
      I really, really wanted to read Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff - mostly because I enjoy a good drama centered around the overcoming of a tragedy. So when I saw the summary and the author combination here I couldn't wait to crack it open and get emotionally involved.There were things that Woodruff did extremely well in Those We Love Most - those being the tension between family, the struggle to put the pieces back together, the vulnerability after walls come down in grief. I felt intimately connected to every member of the family at different moments throughout the book. But in spite of that intimate connection, I still felt as if I was held at arms length.I think ultimately where the breakdown occurred was in the number of people Those We Love Most dealt with. There were some family members who were on the outskirts, just barely into the story and, as a result, made me feel as if I was still a stranger to what was going on - but the juxtiposition then of having other family members bared completely to me made me feel as if I wasn't a stranger. So ultimately I ended up slightly confused and unable to connect. I just can't think of a better way to put it.I still recommend reading this book - I think it has some important messages on dealing with grief and guilt, and what happens when trust starts to fracture. I just wish it had been easier for me to connect with.
    • 5/5
      I love a book that has such powerful emotional honesty that you just can't help becoming invested in it. CBS This Morning journalist Lee Woodruff's first novel, Those We Love Most, is one of those books.This is a multigenerational story, about Maura, wife and mom to three young children, and her mother Margaret. A moment of inattention by Maura forever changes their lives, one that will cause her to feel incredible guilt and pain. The tragedy that follows is compounded by the secret of betrayal that Maura carries.Margaret is a rock for her daughter, doing all she can to get her and the family through the aftermath of a beloved child's death. She loves her husband Roger, and when he faces a health crisis, she is also forced to face a secret that he has been hiding from her, one that if she were honest with herself, she already knew.This is a novel about how hard it is to be married, and the resilience of the human spirit. Margaret describes her life with Roger after many years together:"The patterns and paths of their life together, especially in the past decade, had become more and more divergent. She had her set schedule: gardening, bridge, exercise, and the occasional lunch with friends. Being a devoted grandmother, a role of which she was immensely proud, also took up a large portion of her time....But Roger spent too much time in the office at his stage in life, in her opinion."Margaret is a character that many women will relate to: the one who keeps things together, who never falls apart, soldiers through everything."Margaret believed it was wife's job to keep the exterior facade spackled and impenetrable, to prevent the cracks from showing on the outside. In her mind, a classy woman never broke rank."Maura and her husband Pete had their own problems before the tragedy."Things had been operating on this half-speed for a while, Maura acknowledged, each of them heading down an easy slipstream in marriage where the valuable, intimate parts begin to erode in a tidal wave of banality." Woodruff succeeds in bringing these women to life; indeed, they are women you feel that you know in your own life. Her observations about marriage at its different stages will resonate with many women.The writing is insightful, and the scenes at the hospital will break your heart. It is clear that Woodruff drew on her own experiences with her husband ABC Bob Woodruff's traumatic brain injuries suffered during the Iraq War to write these emotional passages.I can't remembered being so viscerally affected by a novel; Woodruff's first work of fiction is emotional, heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting. This is a book I will recommend to anyone looking for a story to lose yourself in.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like this book but the characters didn't really interest me and everything was predictable. About halfway through I started wishing it would just end and then I skimmed through it until it did.
    • 3/5
      This was a random pick from my local library shelves. As such, I guess it wasn't too bad, but the final resolution fails the reality test for me, hence my 'romance' tag. Large chunks of the story are actually quite believable - enough to give it a pass mark and keep me reading through to the end. And the essence of the story is one that I found worthwhile. I think most people would recognise that our lives can easily move from happy to tragic through a quirk of fate or accident of bad timing. Moreover, even though we may be objectively seen as having minimal blame in that tragic turn of events, we may nonetheless feel a heavy weight of guilt and that guilty feeling itself can be destructive of our relationships. The fact that this novel explores these issues is good, I think.
    • 3/5
      This was my first book by Lee Woodruff and I enjoyed it. It was a little depressing at times; however, shows how families get through challenges and obstacles without walking away.

      The story goes back and forth from the mom and dad and at the same time the daughter and her family. "Those We Love Most" chronicles how these unforgettable characters confront their choices, examine their mistakes, fight for their most valuable relationships, and ultimately find their way back to each other. It takes us deep into the heart of what makes families and marriages tick and explores a fundamental question: when the ties that bind us to those we love are strained or broken, how do we pick up the pieces? I look forward to reading more from this author!
    • 4/5
      Maura Corrigan is walking her children to school when her phone vibrates, signaling a new text message. In the instant she spends smiling secretly to herself and beginning to formulate a witty reply, her attention diverted from her children, the unthinkable happens. How Maura, husband Pete, and parents Margaret and Roger deal with this tragedy forms the central theme of this debut novel.

      A passage from the book seems to sum it up nicely: Please kept secrets. People built walls. It didn’t mean they couldn’t and didn’t love with all their hearts. … Maybe silence was a price we sometimes paid for loving so completely, the price we sometimes paid to protect those we loved most.

      This is not a plot-driven novel, it is character-driven, and all these characters are flawed. Margaret is maddeningly controlled and controlling. Charismatic Roger cannot bring himself to face his diminishing skills and takes a mistress to keep himself feeling young. Pete has never outgrown his college-boy drinking. Maura bears the burden of a guilty secret, and cannot bring herself to forgive anyone else, let alone herself.

      But flaws notwithstanding, they are an extended family and they love each other. The novel covers just over a year in their lives; as they try to recover from the tragedy, they alternately turn to or reject each other in their grief and distress. The reader can only watch them stumble along, hurting one another, understanding one another, forgiving one another.
    • 3/5
      I anticipated being deeply affected by this book because it centered around the death of a child; however, I never felt connected with the parents or grandparents of this child. Their grief should have been palpable, and it wasn't. Each of the main characters grieved in a self absorption that excluded an understanding of others' grief. The child's mother and grandfather were each involved in extramarital affairs while the child's father existed in an alcoholic haze of self-pity and the grandmother silently observed her husband's affair through pursed lips. This is not a book I will remember.