Vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Megan Feld­man had nev­er con­sid­ered her­self a for­giv­ing per­son. She’d just gone through a breakup and felt per­fect­ly jus­ti­fied in hat­ing her ex for­ev­er. But then she encoun­tered a man who had tru­ly for­giv­en the teenag­er who mur­dered his only son. How could any­one for­give that? Was there some­thing wrong with him? Or was there some­thing wrong with her? So Megan set out on a glob­al adven­ture — not just to find out what for­give­ness is, but how it works. Exam­in­ing sit­u­a­tions as mun­dane as road rage, as painful as cheat­ing spous­es, and as unthink­able as war crimes, she dis­cov­ers the remark­able phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits of for­give­ness, reveal­ing some of the best ways we can learn to do it our­selves = as both indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties — because it turns out that the abil­i­ty to for­give and put down the bur­dens of the past real­ly is what deter­mines our qual­i­ty of life, whether after a nasty breakup or a much more severe loss.