The Wedding People

Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand Newport hotel with no luggage and no intention of ever checking out — she has come here, quietly, to end her life. But the hotel is entirely booked for an elaborate week-long wedding, and Phoebe is mistaken for one of the guests.

Drawn, against all her plans, into the orbit of the high-strung bride and her entourage, Phoebe finds that a single honest conversation with a stranger can change the direction of a life. As the wedding week unfolds, she becomes an unlikely confidante to the very people she meant to disappear from.

Alison Espach's warm, funny, and unexpectedly moving novel is about grief, reinvention, and the strangers who catch us when we are falling.