Dear Zoe: A Novel

Philip Beard’s stunning debut novel is fifteen-year-old Tess DeNunzio’s letter to her sister, Zoe, lost to a hit-and-run driver on a day when it seemed that nothing mattered but the tragedies playing out in New York and Washington.Dear Zoeis a remarkable study of grief, adolescence, and healing with a pitch-perfect narrator who is at once sharp and naive, world- worried and self-centered, funny and heartbreakingly honest. Tess begins her letter to Zoe as a means of figuring out her own life, her place in the world, but the result is a novel of rare power and grace that tells us much about ours. BACKCOVER- LikeThe Lovely Bones, Dear Zoe is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.
-Booklist(starred review)

Beard peels away the layers of his protagonist’s anguish simply and sensitively… and creates real, multidimensional and affecting characters.
-The Washington Post

The whole novel … rings with truth.
-The Buffalo News