When her best friend is murdered, a young teacher flies from the US to London to help her friend’s grieving 8-year-old daughter recover from her mother’s death.

On a tree-lined street in affluent Notting Hill, brilliant, beautiful Lucy Stafford was murdered in broad daylight while walking her 8-year-old daughter Sophie to school. Stunned, Lucy’s best friend Ellie Lerner boards a plane to London for the funeral, leaving her husband, Phillip, behind, knowing only that she must spend time with her goddaughter. The little girl is in shock, and refuses to speak, while her father, Greg, withdraws into his own very private grief. Instinctively Ellie reaches for the classic book that gave her so much comfort when she was a child - The Secret Garden. As Ellie reads, the weeks pass and gradually the child begins to thaw. It is then that Ellie realizes she, too, has issues of her own that she must finally come to terms with- the still birth of her child, her true feelings for her husband, and a revelation about Lucy herself which sets Ellie reeling.

Filled with the loving and eccentric characters that made The Opposite of Love such a success, with wisdom far beyond her years, Julie Buxbaum has written a novel that explores the resilience of the heart, and the ability for books to reawaken the spirit.