Forward Always

About this book

FORWARD ALWAYSA sweeping, luminous debut about love, inheritance, and the woman who decides the cycle ends with her.They say generational trauma passes from one generation to the next, until someone makes the conscious decision to stop it.To look at everything they have inherited from the love that comes in seasons, the worth that must be earned, the doors kept closed against the things too large to examine, and to decide, deliberately and at great personal cost, that it ends here. That the pattern stops with this generation and does not continue into the next.Juliana made that decision. Not once, in a single moment of transformation. Daily. For an entire lifetime.Born in Paris to an interfaith marriage that was never meant to survive, raised between Beirut, Bahrain, and Cairo against a backdrop of war and displacement, Juliana grows up reading the weather of an unstable home. A mother who loves her in seasons, a father whose approval always stays just out of reach. She inherits what children of such homes inherit: the silence, the performance, the bone-deep belief that love must be earned and can be taken away. She carries one question beneath everything she does - What is love, and am I worthy of it?That question shapes her whole life. And when she finally becomes a mother herself, she makes a vow that will be tested beyond anything she could have imagined: that her children will not inherit the wound. That the pattern stops with her.Then an ordinary Sunday morning changes everything, and Juliana must discover whether the cycle she has fought her whole life to break is strong enough to hold her together when she needs it most.Spanning six decades and four countries, Forward Always is an unforgettable story about the patterns we inherit and the courage it takes to end them. About mothers and daughters across generations. About marriage, motherhood, grief, and grace. About the difference between the love we are given, the love we reach for, and the love we finally learn to give ourselves, and pass on.Because real love is not the simple kind. It is the kind built from the most difficult materials, by people who decide in full knowledge of what it costs and that the alternative is not acceptable.This is the story of a woman who decided the pain ends with her. Forward. Always forward.