A Sweet Tale of Life after Loss in Elizabeth Berg’s 'The Story of Arthur Truluv'

“ In the great unknown, there was one constant: everything would be all right .” That’s the basic belief of the main character in Elizabeth Berg ’s new novel, The Story of Arthur Truluv. Arthur Moses, aka Truluv , is an 85-year-old widower. At a glance, his life seems rather ordinary. He lives with his cat Gordon, he tends to his garden. But he visits his beloved deceased wife Nola’s grave every day at lunchtime, taking a simple sandwich and sometimes a baked good from his neighbor Lucille. He eventually crosses paths with another frequent graveyard visitor, the angsty 18-year-old Maddy Harris who also lost her mother at an early age. Over time, Arthur, Maddy and Lucille form an unconventional family of sorts, guided in large part by Arthur’s quiet wisdom on the concepts of kindness, aging, acceptance, and the meaning of life itself. Berg says that Arthur was the character she fixated on before starting up on this book. "I started with an image of an old man going out to a cemetery to