Bøger af Dani Shapiro

On a summer night in 1985, three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything changes.A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the YearSignal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive—a young couple expecting a baby boy—it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son who marvels at the beauty of the world and has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen.In Dani Shapiro’s first work of fiction in fifteen years, she returns to the form that launched her career, with a riveting, deeply felt novel that examines the ties that bind families together—and the secrets that can break them apart. Signal Fires is a work of haunting beauty by a masterly storyteller.

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the nude portraits she took of Clara throughout her childhood.At age eighteen, sick of her notoriety as 'the girl in the pictures', Clara fled New York City, settling and making her own family in small-town Maine. But years later, when Ruth reaches out from her deathbed, Clara suddenly finds herself drawn back to the past she thought she had escaped.From the beloved author of Signal Fires and Family History, Black & White is a moving love letter to those familial bonds that both bruise and make you in equal measure.

Rachel Jensen has it all: a husband she adores, fulfilling work in art restoration, a terrific teenage daughter and finally a new baby on the way. So when she worries about mysterious changes in her daughter Kate's behaviour, friends reassure her it's just normal teen angst.But then a terrifying accident involving Kate and her infant brother sets off a series of events that threaten to destroy everything Rachel has worked so hard to build.From the beloved author of Signal Fires and Black & White, Family History is a visceral, ferociously paced novel about one mothers nightmarish realisation that she cannot protect her own child.

“Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro's long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between.”—Jennifer EganFrom Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers—and anyone with an artistic temperament—will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

"Devotion's biggest triumph is its voice: funny and unpretentious, concrete and earthy--appealing to skeptics and believers alike. This is a gripping, beautiful story." -- Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep"I was immensely moved by this elegant book." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, LoveDani Shapiro, the acclaimed author of the novel Black and White and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, is back with Devotion: a searching and timeless new memoir that examines the fundamental questions that wake women in the middle of the night, and grapples with the ways faith, prayer, and devotion affect everyday life. Devotion is sure to appeal to all those dealing with the trials and tribulations of what Carl Jung called "the afternoon of life."

"Chilling. . . . There is a gritty honesty to her cautionary confession that will alert others to listen for and respond to wake-up calls of their own." -- New York Times Book ReviewSlow Motion is the critically-lauded bestselling memoir from acclaimed novelist Dani Shapiro (Black & White, Family History) -- a "riveting" and "breathtaking" look (San Francisco Chronicle), free of self-pity or regret, at a life that was rescued by an unspeakable tragedy.At twenty-three, Dani Shapiro was in the midst of a major rebellion against her religious upbringing. She had dropped out of college, was halfheartedly acting in television commercials, and was carrying on with an older married man when her life was changed, in an instant, by a phone call. Her parents had been in a devastating car accident. Neither was expected to survive. In her first memoir, Shapiro offers this powerful true story of a life turned around--not by miracles or happy endings, but by unexpected personal catastrophe.

Elle Best Books of 2017Kirkus Best Books of 2017The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love. Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.      What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise--how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.

An InstantNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER ALOS ANGELES TIMES, BOSTON GLOBE, WALL STREET JOURNAL,and NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR according toElle, Real Simple, andKirkus Reviews ';Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.' People Magazine ';Beautifully written and deeply movingit brought me to tears more than once.'Ruth Franklin,The New York Times Book Review From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist, novelist';a writer of rare talent' (Cheryl Strayed) and host of the hit podcastFamily Secrets, comesa memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. Inheritanceis a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

From the prodigiously gifted author of the acclaimed memoir Slow Motion, a stunning and brutally honest novel about one family's harrowing recovery from devastation. Rachel Jensen is perfectly happy: in love with her husband, devoted to their daughter Kate, gratified by her work restoring art. And finally, she's pregnant again. But as Rachel discovers, perfection can unravel in an instant. The summer she is thirteen, Kate returns from camp sullen, angry, and withdrawn. Everyone assures Rachel it's typical adolescent angst. But then Kate has a terrifying accident with her infant brother, and the ensuing guilt brings forth a dreadful lie—one that ruptures their family, perhaps irrevocably. Family History is a mesmerizing journey through the mysteries of adolescent pain and family crisis.