Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City–based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn’t just a family legend—it made headlines across Canada in 1913—but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s.
Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg’s Hebrew Colony, and his mother’s downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years.
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“This is one of those rare, fine books that gives you two of the dearest gifts in literature: a story so consuming you forget time, and an author with the gift to spin, from these supposedly ordinary lives, a profound chronicle of identity, family, memory, and love—and suspense, too.”
— Boris Fishman, author of Savage Feast
“This is a unique addition to the cold case subgenre, and a powerful mix of true crime and family memoir.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Wayne Hoffman is the author of several novels. By day, he is a journalist: his cultural reporting has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Village Voice, The Nation, The Forward, Billboard, and The Advocate. He is executive editor of Tablet magazine. A native of Silver Spring, Maryland, he currently lives in New York City and the Catskills.