Forgiveness: A Contemporary Women’s Fiction Novel

Susen Edwards's Forgiveness opens on New Year's Eve 2020, as seventy-year-old artist Fiona Goldberg marks the fiftieth anniversary of the drunk-driving crash that killed her best friend Melissa, a tragedy punished with a mere two-hundred-dollar fine. Fiona realizes she has lived with undiagnosed PTSD for five decades. In 1969, she met Reuben Goldberg, an anti-war activist whose Vietnam draft notice led the couple to Toronto in 1971. There, Fiona faced rejection from her mother and her subsequent death. She had an affair with housemate Jerry, a secret abortion at the Margaret Sanger Clinic, and a painful 1977 separation, before the lovers reunite and marry in 1982. Now, Reuben suffers a tragedy at the January 6 Capitol, and Fiona races to his Arlington hospital bedside. A confession on a train home might make or destroy their lives.

Susen Edwards's spellbinding novel is deliberately paced, allowing Fiona’s memories to unfold across a middle act spanning 1971–1977. This pacing choice privileges reflection over momentum, but pays off when past and present converge on the Acela. The worldbuilding is meticulously researched—from Mark Satin's Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada and Carter's Proclamation 4483 to COVID-era masking protocols and the ‘Hang Mike Pence” chants of the January 6 Insurrection. Character work is spectacular. Fiona is that insecure young woman who “never learned how to say no” and the accomplished gallery owner masking her wounds behind a ‘fake it till you make it” persona, silently carrying guilt over Jerry, her abortion, and her lost family for fifty years. Reuben is equally layered: the principled idealist who fled the draft is also the stubborn partner whose agenda-driven life helped fracture their bond, and his concealed decades-long knowledge of Fiona’s secret exposes a private guilt equal to hers. Through these interlocking timelines, Forgiveness examines forgiveness not as a single act but as a lifelong practice—extended to parents, lovers, and nations, but most crucially to oneself. It is, in turns, heartwarming and resonant, and the superior storytelling makes the characters and the tangled plot even more rewarding.