These, then, were Eva's half-memories. Of words but not their meanings, of a sweater but not the face above it. Of a box, the corner of a room, the scratch of wool, but never a whole father, or even a whole mother the way she'd been before. These were among the things she hoarded, like the nail files, key chains, and pink erasers she kept hidden in a shoebox, her loot. Because mostly, she didn't remember. Critics across the country hailed Elizabeth Graver's first novel, UNRAVELLING, as "exceptional" (The New York Times Book Review), a "pleasure" (The New Yorker), and "exquisitely poignant and sensual" (The Boston Globe). Now, Graver turns her talents to a contemporary novel about a woman and child who find that they cannot move ahead with the future until they can look clearly at the past. The summer that eleven-year-old Eva is picked up on her fourth shoplifting charge, her mother, Miriam, decides that the only solution is to move from Manhattan to a quiet town in upstate New York.

There, she tells Eva, they can have a "normal" life. But what Miriam doesn't tell her daughter, or anyone else, is that Eva's stealing scares her for a different reason, one related to a past she has been trying to ignore. As tensions mount between mother and daughter, it is, oddly enough, Eva's secret frienship with Burl - a reclusive beekeeper who lives down the road - that ultimately helps the two find their way back to each other. THE HONEY THIEF is a haunting, lyrical novel about the shadow the past casts on the present, the workings of memory and desire, and the healing powers of unexpected friendship.