The Sweetness of Forgetting Books in Order

The Sweetness of Forgetting is a loosely linked mini‑series built around one family’s secrets and the way they echo across decades. At its heart is a Cape Cod bakery, a Parisian past, and the question of how much truth we owe the people we love.

In the novel, readers meet Hope McKenna‑Smith, a thirty‑something divorcée juggling a struggling family bakery on Cape Cod, a prickly preteen daughter, and the slow decline of her French‑born grandmother, Rose, who is slipping away into Alzheimer’s. Hope never planned to inherit the North Star Bakery, and she is worn thin by early mornings, unpaid bills, and the sense that her own dreams have quietly faded.

Everything tilts the night Rose has a rare moment of clarity.

In that window of lucidity, Rose hands Hope a mysterious list of names and urges her granddaughter to travel to Paris before it is too late. What begins as a desperate attempt to honor a final request becomes a journey into Rose’s hidden history as a Jewish teenager in World War II, a search that takes Hope through old neighborhoods, archives, and cafés as she uncovers the fate of people her grandmother loved and lost.

The book moves back and forth between present‑day Cape Cod and occupied Paris, layering the smells of fresh bread and cinnamon over memories of starvation, fear, and small acts of courage. As Hope pieces together the story behind the North Star Bakery’s recipes and the constellations Rose still watches each night, she is forced to rethink her ideas about faith, forgiveness, and what it means to keep a promise.

The companion short story The Snow Globe shifts the focus to Paris in 1942, on a single snowy Christmas Eve. A sixteen‑year‑old Jewish boy lingers too long in the Jardin du Luxembourg and falls, in an instant, for a girl named Rose, sealing his fate with a simple gift and a fragile shard of hope. It is a brief, aching glimpse of first love under occupation that casts a new light on the secrets Rose carries into old age.

Taken together, The Sweetness of Forgetting and its snowy prequel sketch a world where food, memory, and starlit skies become lifelines. Readers can expect family mystery, travel between Cape Cod and Paris, recipes threaded through the chapters, and a tone that balances the weight of Holocaust history with moments of warmth, humor, and grace.