Just twenty years ago now, the Kinsella were, in appearance, an idyllic and happy family. Overnight, Rachel's husband sold without telling her the house in which they lived and took the five children abroad. It took her a year to see them again, and her panic was so intense that she staggered down the sidewalk as she approached her meeting. Just twenty years after the breakup, this very weekend when three of Rachel's sons—Ellen and twins Joe and Michael—are already adults, each mired in their particular personal crisis, have gathered in the maternal home. Since that traumatic separation, the Kinsella are not good at farewells, but also the meetings, in which the echoes of the past overwhelm them. Inevitably, with such vivid memories for Rachel, it is not surprising that a casual conversation, on the porch, after dinner, leads to a confession about the events that led to that rupture; what she certainly doesn't expect is that her children will also have something to tell her.

In Any Love, Jane Smiley takes up the universe of family relationships, focusing this time on the fear we feel of irreparably hurting, with our most intimate choices, those we love most. In a narrative that unfolds like a spiral of emotional revelations that Rachel is going to unlarge over a weekend, Smiley shows us the ways in which ordinary loves develop, those we live every day, and with accuracy, patience and tenderness dismantles the myth of the perfect family.