About the Book

From the author of Discovering the Body (“so sure handed and graceful you might forget it’s a murder mystery” —The New York Times Book Review), comes the impassioned drama of a ballet dancer’s artistic obsession with her body and a revelation of the ways that harrowing details of four generations of her family created her myth of certain stardom and challenge her to accept new joy and purpose after a devastating loss.

Burning with a temperature one summer night, six-year-old Nikki Mendel is carried to the back yard pond by Grandpa Henry, dead since the end of winter. As cold water breaks her fever, he terrifies her with near drowning. She is left with proof he came back to save her: his pipe tobacco smell, the rasp of his whiskered cheek, a peppermint he left in her hand.

Fifteen years later, Nikki returns home on the eve of change. Her brother Jonas, now thirty, has never moved out. Gabe, a New York actor, shows up the next day. Their mother has summoned them to hear her plan to urge Jonas out on his own by selling the house, a surprise strategy that propels the family’s long-suppressed grief into an act of irreversible loss. In the aftermath of tragedy, Nikki throws herself into her dance career, only to suffer a devastating injury. A lifelong dancer, she feels destroyed by the loss of her perfect dancer’s body.

Parallel to Nikki’s story is the story of Grandpa Henry’s double identity, details hidden from her that led to his guarantee she’d be a ballet star — and may have handed down to her through the generations the way she chooses to deal with loss. Their stories intertwine but never touch until she makes a discovery that convinces her she can form a new identity without dance to define her.

The novel asks whether meaning survives when the body fails, whether myth can coexist with truth, and whether faith — in love, in art, or in ghosts — is a form of courage or avoidance. The Man in the Bed is about inheritance: what we carry, what we lose, and what we choose to live with once old certainties are gone.

What Readers Say

The Man in the Bed is a love affair of a girl with her grandfather, a dancer with her body, and a man with the family he is destined to lose. A propulsive mystery, a family saga, and a tale of triumph studded with secrets, lost chances, missed connections, betrayals, and wild hope, this book is devastating in the best ways and fiercely uplifting at the same time. I was transported and transformed right along with Nikki.
I loved the book! It kept me guessing at every turn. I was swept away by the leaps and the wild highs and lows, and Mary Howard’s prose, as always, is beautiful. I love when a book can truly surprise me, and this one did.

Misty Urban – author of What Happens in Hedone

Of course, families are unhappy each in their own way. This family history unfolds with a tug of magical realism, an impulsive dive into dangerous waters that cannot be undone, and a ballerina who suffers a grievous loss and faces inspiration from an unlikely source. Lose yourself in the lovely, lyrical writing that tells Nikki’s story as the most important family bond in her young life comes full circle.

Fern Kupfer – author of Strong Women in Chicago

Mary Howard’s latest novel, The Man in the Bed, skillfully propels a reader into the entangled lives of three generations of a midwestern family. Its characters’ fates balance on a buried dramatic history of retribution and misunderstanding. They struggle against that inheritance, within the limits of their prairie communities, their yearning for a music, literal and figurative, that they hope will allow them grace. And it often does—for a while. But what they’re after, what we want for them, is beyond music. There are depths here.

Stephen Pett – author of This Impossible Vertical World