My sister called it 'the year of secrets,' but when I look back on it now, I've come to understand that it was a time not of what was there, but of what wasn't. When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note among their late father's papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death.The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral. Erik is a psychiatrist dangerously vulnerable to his patients; Inga is a writer whose late husband, a famous novelist, seems to have concealed a secret life. Interwoven with each new mystery in their lives are discoveries about their father’s youth - poverty, the War, the Depression - that bring new implications to his relationship with his children.