-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
A Novel
This luminous tale filled with honesty and love charts the lives of sisters who find their curse and their salvation on the street where they live. One fateful summer they create their own magical world to escape a tragic encounter that has forever changed their lives. The healing power of imagination and love, the interwoven worlds of fiction and fact, the difference between liars and truth tellers, are at the core of this dangerous fairy-tale world where one mistake can follow you forever.
A charismatic man who cannot tell the truth, a neighbor who is not who he appears to be, a clumsy boy in Paris who falls in love and stays there, a detective who finds his heart's desire, a demon who will not let go, all live within the confines of the sisters' world. Elv, Claire, and Meg are the Story Sisters, and each has a fate she must meet alone. One on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them, and finally redeem them.
What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray? How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others? How deep can love go, and how far can it take you? These are the questions this complex novel asks. This is the spellbinding story Alice Hoffman has to tell.
"Hoffman's prose is as lovely as ever ... but Elv's troubles and the Story family's nonstop catastrophes are wearying." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Her alluring characters are soulful, their suffering mythic, and though the sorrows are many and the body count high, this is an entrancing and romantic drama ..." - Booklist
"This is one of Hoffman's darkest novels yet, and some of Hoffman's readers may find it too dark." - Library Journal
"A near-miss from this uneven but always compelling writer." - Kirkus
This information about The Story Sisters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Deborah Feingold
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and '74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.
Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Alice Hoffman's Website
Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
