Her sister left her a map. It leads to four places on three continents, and to the one thing Rose has never been able to say out loud.

Rose Morgan has spent her life being the one who stays. When her older sister Jill dies after a lifetime of failing hearts and hospital rooms, Rose moves back into the Berkeley house where their mother polishes seashells behind a closed door, and their stepfather builds things in the garage so he won't have to speak. Then she finds the journal under Jill's mattress.

It is an itinerary. Paris, five days. Sydney, seven. Bali, ten. A Greek island with no name. In the margins, in Jill's hand, a word Rose has never seen: Moirai Pockets — thin places in the world where time folds, where grief wears the veil between the living and the dead thin enough to reach through. Jill had been planning to go. Now she is asking Rose to go instead.

What waits at each stop is not what Rose expects. A stone figurine that remembers every woman who has ever held it. An Aboriginal elder who has been sitting on a mountain since dawn because a dead girl in California wrote and asked her to. A pen pal from Kyoto with a box of seven dark figures. A charming writer who collects grieving women's stories, and who has decided Rose's is next. And at the end of the thread, three rocks rising from the Aegean that the islanders call The Sisters — where Jill has arranged for the whole family to finally stand in the same place at the same time.

To get there, Rose will have to open the one door she has kept shut since she was seventeen. Jill, it turns out, left that on the map too.

The Golden Thread is a novel about the sister who dies and the sister who is left to carry her — about mothers who cannot stop cleaning, daughters who run, the men who orbit grief instead of entering it, and the long line of women who have been quietly handing each other strength since before anyone wrote it down.