ELIZABETH BERG

Elizabeth Berg, bestselling author of The Art of Mending and The Year of Pleasures, has a rare talent for revealing her characters hearts and minds in a manner that makes us empathize completely. Her new novel, We Are All Welcome Here, features three women, each struggling against overwhelming odds for her own kind of freedom.It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elviss birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently-and violently-across the state. But in Paige Dunns small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit-with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.Diana is trying in her own fashion to live a normal life. As a fourteen-year-old, she wants to make money for clothes and magazines, to slough off the authority of her mother and Peacie, to figure out the puzzle that is boys, and to escape the oppressiveness she sees everywhere in her small town. What she can never escape, however, is the way her life is markedly different from others. Nor can she escape her ongoing responsibility to assist in caring for her mother. Paige Dunn is attractive, charming, intelligent, and lively, but her needs are great-and relentless.As the summer unfolds, hate and adversity will visit this modest home. Despite the difficulties thrust upon them, each of the women will find her own path to independence, understanding, and peace. And Dianas mother, so mightily compromised, will end up giving her daughter an extraordinary gift few parents could match.

'You know people like me. I'm the one who sat in the hall selling tickets to the prom but never going, the one everybody liked but no one wanted to be with.'A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinsky has endured the isolation of her middle life by immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse and by doting on her dog, Frank. Myra considers herself reasonably content, telling herself, It's enough, work and Frank. And is has to be enough - until Chip Reardon, the too-good-to-be-true golden boy she adored from afar whilst at high school, is assigned to be her new patient. Choosing to forgo invasive treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned home from Manhattan to the New England home of his childhood to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poignant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence and longing.

When is a marriage worth saving, and when is it worth letting go?'He felt his stomach tighten, his heart begin to race. The coffeemaker beeped, signalling its readiness, and Ellen got up and poured two mugs. She set one in front of Griffin, one in front of herself. Griffin watched the steam rise up and curl back on itself, then dissipate. He said quietly, 'I'm not going anywhere.' 'Pardon?' 'I said, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not moving.' She nodded. 'I see. Well, I can't. I have to be here to take care of Zoe.' Griffin pictured his daughter, a redheaded beauty who would knock the stuffing out of any man who crossed her. 'All right, you can stay, too,' he told Ellen. 'Griffin. One of us has to go.' In Say When, Elizabeth Berg negotiates perfectly the fine balance between humour and poignancy as she charts the days and nights of a family whose normal life has been shattered. Told from the point of view of a man who goes overnight from being a husband to becoming his wife's roommate, this is a gripping and heartfelt story. Praise for Elizabeth Berg'Heartwrenching-Hilarious-Berg sits somewhere between Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman.' Chicago Sun-Times 'Maybe Freud didn't know the answer to what women want, but Elizabeth Berg certainly does.' USA Today

It begins with the sudden revelation of astonishing secrets secrets that have shaped the personalities and fates of three siblings, and now threaten to tear them apart. In renowned author Elizabeth Berg's moving new novel, unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past? Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year's gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family's restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness. Readers have come to love Elizabeth Berg for the "lucent beauty of [her] prose, the verity of her insights, and the tenderness of her regard for her fellow human" (Booklist). In The Art of Mending, her most profound and emotionally satisfying novel to date, she confronts some of the deepest mysteries of life, as she explores how even the largest sins can be forgiven by the smallest gestures, and how grace can come to many through the trials of one.