THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.