While We Were Waiting

A vibrant novel that portrays the lives of an American woman fleeing the trauma of childhood abuse and an Iraqi refugee fleeing the trauma of war, each in the midst of childbirth, that Joyce Carol Oates praises as “breathtaking, heartrending, and finally uplifting” and Richard Ford exclaims “involved me so thoroughly that I began to anticipate how it would end.”

Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine’s sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over the next hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they’d never thought possible: Will struggling with the loss of colleagues who perished with the World Trade Center; Lorraine, a musical prodigy dealing with the memories of sexual abuse.

Into the waiting room where Will struggles with his present and past enters Clement, an archeologist, newly arrived in America—fleeing ISIS in Iraq, plagued by the memories of a terrorist attack, the husband of another patient making his own sense of the extremes that prevail with high-risk births. The agony of this waiting husband stems as much from his own traumatic circumstances as from fear for his wife and unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine’s labor compels her to let go of the terrible harm done to her as a child, making While We Were Waiting a story about the power of acceptance and the resilience of love.