My backlist is coming! My backlist is coming!

I’m really excited that my backlist is coming back onto ebooks, from the wonderful Dzanc Books and Open Road media, so I just want to tell you a little about the books, all available as e-books wherever e-books are sold (that means Kobo, Nook, etc.) And you can pre-order them! The book photos were all done by the wonderful Jill Dodds and the books will be out August 5th!

Meeting Rozzy Halfway is my first novel and it made me famous and it came about by mistake, almost. I never intended to be a novelist. I was going to be a short story writer, and I could have papered my walls with rejections. Meeting Rozzy Halfway is about two sisters growing up in Boston, tightly bound together until one of them begins to slowly go mad. I wrote the story and sent it off to Redbook magazine’s Young Writers Contest (I was really young), expecting nothing. Months later, I was coming home from another terrible job I was fired from (this one was working at a puzzle factory that made obscene puzzles) when I saw the big brown envelope that I knew meant rejection. I tore it in a million pieces, spreading it like confetti on my front stoop.

And then I happened to see one word: congratulations. I leaped down and put all the pieces together. it turned out I won First Prize! They wanted the story! And publishers began calling! Rozzy made me known. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, and I was flown to NYC to be interviewed by Publisher’s Weekly. I was on TV and radio and feted and raved about in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Kansas City Star and just about every paper on the planet. I even had a film option from Paramount. I thought my career would always be like that!  (But that's another story, one of publishers going out of business, sales forces leaving, and a final rescue by my adored publisher, Algonquin Books.

My second novel coming out is called Lifelines and it’s really a novel about identity, and the fight between a Russian mother, who may or may not be psychic, and the daughter she is sure has inherited her gift. The Los Angeles Times commented on my “strong and memorable characters” and said the book was “excellent.”Do I believe in gifts like that? I admit I sort of do and I keep two decks of Tarot cards in my office and pull three cards every day.  This publisher, who also published Rozzy, went out of business. Sigh.

My third novel Family is about the feeling we all have--that someone we are orphans, that we can never really belong to anyone. For this one, the New York Times said, “There is no denying this author’s talent.” I chose the name because I was thinking about the nature of family, but also because there was this great old TV drama with the same name, and being superstitious, I thought it would bring me good luck. Family is the story of Nick Austin, who grows up in an orphanage and is both yearning for and terrified of love. He has two families, and one teenage daughter who discovers what her father is doing. (And yes, this publisher, Arbor House, went out of business two weeks before the book was due to come out.)

Into Thin Air is the book I call my Madonna book, only because for three whole days Madonna was considering optioning the book as her directorial debut--then, of course, she went on tour instead. But the option was picked up, a script was written, and then the director ran away wit the producer and that was that. Library Journal called it one of the best books of the year. and compared me to Anne Tyler  It’s the story of Lee Archer a young terrified woman who marries a high school boy sweet on her to escape her family, and finds herself pregnant. After delivering her baby in a hospital, she vanishes into another life, abandoning her young husband and her baby.

These novels are my babies. I hope you’ll read and love them, and help them take their first steps out into the world again.  And if you pre-order, I'll buy you your own planet!