TELL ME AGAIN
a novel
Coming December 8, 2026
After his wife’s sudden death, a widower discovers that the woman he thought he knew completely may have carried a secret for more than fifty years—a secret that could change his understanding of their marriage, their family, and the woman he loved.
How well can we ever know the people we love?
At seventy-three, Conrad Burrell’s days are defined by routine and quiet grief—until a chance encounter reveals that his late wife may have harbored a secret that upends
his understanding of their life together.
What begins as a quest to discover the truth becomes something more unsettling: an inquiry into memory, secrecy, regret, and the familial and chosen relationships that sustain and motivate us. Moving from western Pennsylvania to New York, Paris, Santa Fe, and back, Tell Me Again traces a twisting path of discovery of hidden truths about the past, and of one man’s journey toward a different future.
About Keith
Keith McWalter is a novelist and essayist whose writing explores family, memory, mortality, and the ways private histories shape our lives. A former lawyer, he brings to his fiction and nonfiction writing an interest in family dynamics, the comforts of chosen kin, the social and political morals of our times, and the consequences of our personal choices.
His novels include When We Were All Still Alive, a family saga to which Tell Me Again is a standalone sequel, Lifers, a speculative exploration of radical human longevity, and the forthcoming Tell Me Again, a story of marriage, grief, adoption, and a family secret uncovered after more than fifty years.
Keith’s essays have appeared in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. He’s the author of two blogs, Mortal Coil and Spoiled Guest, which present his essays and travel pieces. A collection of his essays, No One Else Will Tell You: Letters from a Bi-Coastal Father, won a Writer’s Digest Award for nonfiction.
Keith is a graduate of Columbia Law School and earned a BA in English Literature from Denison University. He lives with his wife, Courtney, in Granville, Ohio, and Sanibel, Florida.
Also by Keith McWalter
When We Were All Still Alive (a novel)
Conrad Burrell, a lawyer in late middle age, loses his wife
to a violent accident, and must come to grips with his own mortality and the connections that sustain him.
Lifers (a novel)
In a near future transformed by radical human longevity,
the promise of longer life becomes a profound social and political
dilemma—and forces a cohort of centenarian rebels to confront
the costs of living on…and on.
Befriending Ending (a memoir)
In this fiercely honest memoir, a mother’s sudden passing becomes the springboard for a broad-ranging meditation on individual mortality, our societal failure to acknowledge it, and how we might become better at befriending ending.
The Time Traveler’s Lament (essays)
Spanning Trump’s first term, Covid, the first moon landing, the lasting rituals of family meals, the prescient genius of mid-century disaster fiction, the nature of duty, and the sudden loss of cherished places — these are among the topics explored in these incisive meditations on life in uncertain times.
Mortal Coil
In his blog, Mortal Coil, Keith writes essays ranging from the public to the personal, the polemical to the meditative,
in sometimes humorous but always intelligent examinations of everyday life as it relates to larger social and political issues of the day.