A novel of fractured family and the search to protect–or discard–what unites them, this story traces one older woman's decision to uphold the wishes of those who have departed over her sisters’ objections.  When Pearline abruptly leaves her life in Brooklyn and returns to her childhood home in Jamaica to care for her dying father, Rupert, she leaves her grown daughter to cope, overwhelmed, with her granddaughters back in Brooklyn.  But Pearline isn’t prepared for Rupert’s puzzling deathbed wish that she find siblings she hasn’t seen in 60 years. What is revealed in the wake of Rupert’s death is the secret that splintered the family. Moving through time and place, The House of Plain Truth charts the family's traumatic past in Cuba, where Rupert had sought a better life and where three of Pearline's siblings remained when the rest of the family left for Jamaica. Everything Pearline learns challenges what she knows about her family and the place she has always called home. In lush, lyrical prose inspired by the author's own family story, this novel explores the divided loyalties within a family, the true meaning of home, and what one woman has to sacrifice to get what she ultimately wants.

*Featured in O, the Oprah Magazine* *Selected as one of the Best Books of the Week by the New York Post* A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth; an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see; a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unraveling. To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must find the child’s father who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum’s circuitous route to find her daughter and how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart.

As she washes her laundry in the Rio Minho, Kelithe is startled from her daydreams by women's screams. It is not until she sees a small body in the shallow water that she realizes what has happened. Her young son has drowned. The Women of Standfast, Jamaica, whisper that she let Timothy die so that she could seize her chance to join her mother in America. Numb with grief, Kelithe lacks the strength to confront them. She can only wait for the funeral. And for her mother to come stand by her at last.

What really happened at the river? It is a question Kelithe's mother cannot ask and an accusation Kelithe will not answer. And it lies at the heart of this shattering novel of promises kept and broken. In spare prose, Donna Hemans lays bare the human heart, exploring the unyielding bonds joining mother and child and the many facets of truth.