“‘Someone Should Know This Story’ is both the name of this book and the wish of my heart,” writes Merrill Joan Gerber in the introduction to this retrospective collection of twenty-five stories written over a period of four decades, many of which won awards and appeared in widely read periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, and Mademoiselle.

Gerber takes her teacher Andrew Lytle’s advice to “follow the thread back into the labyrinth” of the heart and its secrets. Finding its starting place with the crises of everyday family life-its conflicts, betrayals, confinements, and its devastating losses-she and her characters constantly reencounter themselves and the persistent yearning to “convey to others what we are” with grace and breathtaking honesty.