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Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

Literary fiction

Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

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Quick take

You'll get wrecked (and put back together).

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Emotional

    Emotional

  • Illustrated icon, Police

    Police

  • Illustrated icon, 400

    400+ pages

  • Illustrated icon, Suburban

    Suburban drama

Synopsis

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are two NYPD rookies assigned to the same Bronx precinct in 1973. They aren’t close friends on the job, but end up living next door to each other outside the city. What goes on behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the stunning events to come.

Ask Again, Yes is a beautifully moving exploration of the friendship and love that blossoms between Francis’s youngest daughter, Kate, and Brian’s son, Peter, who are born six months apart. In the spring of Kate and Peter’s eighth grade year a violent event divides the neighbors, the Stanhopes are forced to move away, and the children are forbidden to have any further contact. But Kate and Peter find a way back to each other, and their relationship is tested by the echoes from their past.

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Get an early look from the first pages of Ask Again, Yes.

Ask Again, Yes

Prologue

July 1973

Francis Gleeson, tall and thin in his powder blue policeman’s uniform, stepped out of the sun and into the shadow of the stocky stone building that was the station house of the Forty-First Precinct. A pair of pantyhose had been hung to dry on a fourth floor fire escape near 167th, and while he waited for another rookie, a cop named Stanhope, Francis noted the perfect stillness of those gossamer legs, the delicate curve where the heel was meant to be. Another building had burned the night before and Francis figured it was now like so many others in the Four-One: nothing left but a hollowed-out shell and a blackened staircase within. The neighborhood kids had all watched it burn from the roofs and fire escapes where they’d dragged their mattresses on that first truly hot day in June. Now, from a block away, Francis could hear them begging the firemen to leave just one hydrant open. He could imagine them hopping back and forth as the pavement grew hot again under their feet.

He looked at his watch and back at the station house door and wondered where Stanhope could be.

Eighty-eight degrees already and not even ten o’clock in the morning. This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs. “You whine like a narrowback,” his uncle Patsy had said to him that morning. “The heat, the heat, the heat.” But Patsy pulled pints inside a cool pub all day. Francis would be walking a beat, dark rings under his arms within fifteen minutes.

“Where’s Stanhope?” Francis asked a pair of fellow rookies also heading out for patrol.

“Trouble with his locker, I think,” one said back.

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Why I love it

As a big-hearted, sensitive, and voracious bookworm, I rate books on the way they make me feel and the impression they will leave on my heart. Full of lovely and intimate revelations, Ask Again, Yes left me feeling exposed and crushed, in the best way possible.

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are NYPD cops, who by chance end up living next door to each other in the same New York City suburb. Despite their working relationship, their wives don’t share the same casual rapport; especially since Brian’s wife (Anne), is a tempestuous woman who trusts no one. Still, there’s no bad blood between the families—at least not until one summer night when a shocking act of violence upends all their lives forever.

After 40 years of following the Stanhopes and the Gleesons (in one luxurious afternoon of reading), these characters had taken up residence in my heart. I knew their vulnerabilities and demons as if they were members of my own family. Not just a literary novel, this book is a staggeringly raw portrayal of mental illness, addiction, and the ties that bind us. I hope you adore it as much as I did.

Member ratings (12,026)

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Repeat authors
View all
The Bodyguard
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
House of Glass
Like Mother, Like Daughter
The Lost Story
The Night Swim
The Pairing
Beach Read
Hera
The God of the Woods
One-Star Romance
The Paradise Problem
We Are the Brennans
Daisy Jones & The Six
This Tender Land
The Silent Patient
The Four Winds
You Are Not Alone
One by One
Yours Truly
Invisible Girl
The Rules of Magic
Survive the Night
Troubles in Paradise
Home Before Dark
The Lost Apothecary
Things You Save in a Fire
Real Americans
The Wishing Game
One Day in December
The Great Alone
People We Meet on Vacation
The Reckless Oath We Made
Lock Every Door
The Family Upstairs
Long Bright River
Infinite Country
Part of Your World
Recursion
The Half Moon
A Ladder to the Sky
The Sun Down Motel
The Mothers
The Vanishing Half
Memorial
The Shadows
Immortal Longings
Just for the Summer
The Connellys of County Down
The Knockout Queen
Happy & You Know It
Ask Again, Yes
Practical Magic
Lot
The Woman in Cabin 10
Dark Matter
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Final Girls
Hello Stranger
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
The Wife Between Us
The Broken Girls
In a Holidaze
The Kiss Quotient
The Last Time I Lied
Gods of Jade and Shadow
A Million Junes
The Bride Test
Darling Girls
The Turn of the Key
The Last Word
Dark Corners
Foul Lady Fortune
Evil Eye
The Soulmate