When Tito Loved Clara

A Novel

A moving and dramatic novel of a suburban wife and mother whose past comes back to haunt her . . .
 
Clara Lugo has escaped her difficult and tumultuous childhood in a Dominican neighborhood in the northern reaches of Manhattan. Now she tries to live a settled professional life with her American husband and son in the suburbs of New Jersey—often thwarted by Clara’s constellation of relatives who don’t understand her gringa ways.
 
Her mostly happy life is disrupted, however, when Tito, a former boyfriend from fifteen years earlier, reappears. He still carries a torch for Clara, and she harbors a secret from their past. Their reunion sets in motion an unraveling of both of their lives—and reveals what assimilation, or the absence of it, has cost them both . . .
 
“Michaud’s quiet account of a foundering marriage and his forays into the mind of an abused child and her adult self are perfectly done.” —Booklist