Sarah Conley

by Ellen Gilchrist

Overview

From National Book Award Winner Ellen Gilchrist, a pillar of Southern literature hailed by the Washington Post as “a national treasure,” comes a poignant novel about contemporary living and the sacrifices we make through the various stages of our life.“Gilchrist keeps you in the palm of her hand when she tells a story.” –Kirkus ReviewSarah Conley is a successful journalist and writer, having pursued her career path with tenacious passion. When her best friend Eugenie falls deathly ill, Sarah flies to Nashville for a final visit. While there, Sarah’s love for Jack, Eugenie’s husband, is rekindled, and it’s apparent he feels the same. He follows her to Paris, where she’s traveling to write a screenplay, and she becomes caught between her two wants. Will Sarah have to decide between the needs of her career and the needs of her heart?“The quirky cadences of Gilchrist’s prose and her witty dialogue are present here in abundance.” –Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635763478
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	12/18/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	291
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ellen Gilchrist is the award-winning author of more than 20 books, including novels, short story collections, essays and poetry. Her new collection of stories, ACTS OF GOD, will be published in April 2014 by Algonquin, along with the paperback release of her novel A DANGEROUS AGE. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas and Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Arkansas.

Editorial Reviews

National Book Award winner Gilchrist (author, most recently, of Courts of Love, LJ 9/15/96) has blessed her followers with another entertaining work of fiction. It presents a complex castnot the least of these being the central character for whom the novel is named. At fiftysomething, Sarah is a high-powered editor at Time magazine and a successful novelist. At the novel's beginning, a childhood friend has died, and an old lovethe husband of that friendhas reentered her life. What seems like an easy opportunity to rekindle an old flame is more akin to mixing fire and gasoline. Gilchrist leads readers between past and present in Sarah's life and explores the marked differences between her dynamic, stressful, urban existence in both New York City and Paris and the possibility of a suburban albeit more emotionally complex life in Nashville. For general fiction collections.Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene

Library Journal

The 13th work of fiction from Gilchrist (The Courts of Love, 1996, etc.), who here tries to give the standard midlife crisis story some fresh vigor by dropping a suddenly eligible old flame into the cast of characters.

Sarah Conley is nothing if not driven. The only offspring of a poor Kentucky family, she managed to support her mother and herself after her father's death while she was still a child—and went on to turn an afterschool job as copygirl at a small-town newspaper into a journalistic career that eventually takes her all the way to Manhattan, where she ends up as an editor of Time. Glamorous, accomplished, and quite self-satisfied, Sarah juggles her career and social life without much effort, and has pretty much gotten over the absence of her son, whose custody she lost in the course of her recent divorce. Then, however, an unexpected summons from Eugenie, an ailing childhood friend, catches her off-guard, and she returns to Kentucky to discover that Eugenie is not merely sick but dying. Eugenie is married to Jack, whom Sarah always loved and who himself fell in love with Sarah after he'd become engaged to Eugenie. And now Sarah and Jack, after an absence of years, feel once more the same passion. Jack pursues Sarah this time around, following her all the way to Paris (where she goes after her final visit with Eugenie) to plead his case. Will love triumph in the end? Can passion be put on hold? And is it really possible to go home again, after all? The most familiar and best-loved potboiler quandaries take on new life under Gilchrist's direction, lending a good deal of shading (if not depth) to a fairly unoriginal plot.

In the end, well-turned-out but unremarkable. Gilchrist keeps you in the palm of her hand when she tells a story, even if it's one that won't be remembered half an hour after it's over.

Kirkus Reviews