Melanie Marsh is a woman possessed. Jittery, unfocused and perpetually unsettled, she barely eats, hardly sleeps and begs her husband to come home from work at all hours of the day. Utterly devoted to her two young children, she lives with a nagging anxiety so severe that even her psychiatrist is at a loss. . .

Abigail Thomas is learning to live — and her dogs are teaching her how. Rather, they are teaching her how to begin again after losing her husband. He isn’t dead but has suffered a brain injury so severe that he has, essentially, disappeared. The person Thomas married is gone. Her “new” husband must spend the rest of his life in an institution. He slips in and out of rages, terrors and hallucinations. The author, though still married, is alone now, traveling in a foreign land, stumbling through unmarked territory. Her dogs show her the way.

Dread settles in from the first sentence of James Reston Jr.’s Fragile Innocence, and it hovers, an unshakeable shadow, over this carefully crafted memoir.