With the pitch-perfect prose and the acuity of perception that have distinguished all of her fiction, including her National Book Award-winning first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, Robb Forman Dew immerses us in the world of Agnes Scofield, whose husband has died mysteriously in an icy morning car crash and whose children have been swept into adulthood by World War II.

Agnes wakes to the realization that she is a tourist in her own life - a wife with no husband, a mother whose children no longer need her - and she must forge a new way of defining herself.

The Truth of the Matter is at once the stunning tale of an American family at midcentury and a timeless portrait of the quiet tensions that arise between parents and children and between the present and the past.