Mary and O'Neil is a moving portrait of two lives drawn together in loss and redeemed by love, this unforgettable novel in stories is, in the words of acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell, "that rare thing: a wholly engrossing story of the ordinary life."

The story opens in 1979, with the event that irrevocably alters O'Neil Burke's life-
the death of his parents in a mysterious car accident, hours after their visit to his New England college campus. In an instant, O'Neil is transformed from carefree college student into a young man whose world is permeated with sorrow. It is this abiding grief that eventually draws O'Neil to Mary Olson, a young woman haunted by events in her own past.

From the final moments of Mary and O'Neil's youth to their deeper relationship together as adults, Justin Cronin forms a luminous collage of the friends and family that bring profound meaning to their lives. Like the work of Alice Hoffman, Cronin's fiction resonates with magical nuance; at every rite of passage, an unexpected encounter-with a beautiful young girl who appears to Mary one night, draped in a cloud of stars; an autistic child who reveals a life-changing secret; a woman O'Neil mistakenly dials the night their first child is born-edify this young couple's intimate bond and affirm their faith in the future.