There's loss and grief and misunderstanding.

These characters are real, raw, somewhat broken, somewhat healed, with fractured pasts and working toward new beginnings. This story features one of my favorite themes, which is found family. As much as I wanted to savor each page, I also wanted to inhale these words I had been longing to read. Seven years of tumultuous life for the author-surviving cancer and then experiencing the loss of both her mother and her sister. It's been seven long years since Sarah Addison Allen's last book. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be an other bird than just the same old thing.'

'There are birds, and then there are other birds. Her published books to date are: Garden Spells (2007), The Sugar Queen (2008), The Girl Who Chased the Moon (2010), The Peach Keeper (2011), Lost Lake (2014), First Frost (2015) and Other Birds (August 30, 2022). Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut 'spellbindingly charming.' The novel became a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection, and then a New York Times Bestseller.Īllen continues to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as 'Southern-fried magic realism.' Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out. Her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate.'Īfter graduation, Allen began writing seriously. In college, she majored in literature - because, as she puts it, 'I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. New York Times Bestselling novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction - a captivating blend of magical realism, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.īorn and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter).

The guardian jeffrey konvitz