Nora Whitmore has a grandfather she has never met.She knows him only as a name at the bottom of birthday cards - *Love, Grandpa Sam* - from a family that was never really hers. Her parents split when she was small; her father, a software engineer who lives inside his screens, has been little more than a weather pattern in another state. And then her mother is gone, killed on a spring highway, and with nowhere else in the world to go, Nora spends the summer in her father's house: the old white farmhouse at the end of Ferris Lane, kept as still and clean as a museum, with one door at the end of the hall she is told not to disturb.That is where she finds him. Grandpa Sam - reclusive, wry, endlessly patient, keeping his own hours, teaching her to stake a tomato and plane a board and finish a thing on someone's behalf. All summer, in a house her father barely looks up from his work to notice, Nora and the old man build something together, and she pours the whole grandfather-shaped emptiness of her life into the only family who ever came when nobody had to.She never wonders why he keeps to himself. Why he never comes to town. Why her father - distracted, forgetful, always in the middle of something - never quite explains. Why the whole small town goes gently quiet whenever she says her grandfather's name.She finds out on his birthday, at the cemetery, reading a date she didn't know.MY FATHER SAM is a luminous, quietly devastating novel about grief, estrangement, and the cost of the things we are always meaning to say - and the strange grace of being given, once, a little more time to say them.
