Time, Memory, Marriage

Hourglass

Compassionate, insightful, and powerfully honest, in Hourglass Dani Shapiro illuminates the deepest mysteries, contradictions, and consolations of so very much - love, memory, the people we used to be and the people we’ve become. In other words: life. I was absorbed by Hourglass and consoled by it, too. It’s a beautiful book by a writer of rare talent

Reading this book was like skating across a perfect piece of ice and then slowly noticing the cracks. Dark, cold water shows through. We can’t see the depths. Be careful, Shapiro warns, be careful, but still she skates on in the fading light with remarkable beauty and grace

Gorgeous, stunning, extraordinary— life-changing

Dani Shapiro’s prose is elegant and crystal clear, the perfect vehicle for her fierce intelligence and curiosity about things that lurk just out of view. Hourglass is such a lovely book

Poignant… Timeless… her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal

The narrative demonstrates Shapiro’s finely tuned, poetic skills as a writer… A sharply observed and frequently moving memoir of marriage

A searing, pared-down narrative. A love story through and through. Shapiro’s retelling of her marriage is both distinctive and painfully relatable.

Dani Shapiro is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Inheritance. Her other books include the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. In February of 2019, Dani launched an original podcast, Family Secrets, in collaboration with iHeartMedia. An iTunes Top 10 podcast, the series features stories from guests who - like Dani - have uncovered life-altering and long-hidden secrets from their past. Along with teaching writing workshops around the world, Dani has taught at Columbia and New York University, and is the cofounder of Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Find her at danishapiro.com.

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, 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. 
 
‘A beautiful book by a writer of rare talent’ Cheryl Strayed

Signal Fires

Signal Fires is a great novel, but it's also something rarer: a good novel, one that shines with deep truths about what it is to love someone, lose them, and live on

Lyrically examines the ways a single event can alter many lives for ever . . . wonderful

Shapiro weaves a compulsive, tender narrative that flits between viewpoints and time frames in its quest for connectivity

A wonderful novel, full of insight and compassion

Beautifully written, Dani Shapiro explores time, memory and our human interconnectedness to create a moving portrayal of the ripple effect one event and one person's actions can have on many lives

Beautiful... a family saga, but a book about destiny too, the unavoidable push and pull of choice and chance

Lyrical and propulsive . . . hard to put down

Wise, deeply perceptive, suffused with light

Signal Fires is an urgent and compassionate meditation on memory, time, and space. In Shapiro's elegant convergence of narrative threads, she creates a world that's as wrenching as it is wondrous

A subtle, compelling and expansive book about family, love and the devastating power of secrets. I love the way Shapiro writes relationships, the ambition of having so many concurrent narratives and the deft way she draws her characters.

Shapiro's characters' interweaving stories grapple with the ways that guilt festers when it's not dealt with - and, ultimately, the unexpected paths that can lead to healing and redemption

A powerful work that delves into the consequences of a long-hidden lie . . . Shapiro's novel offers the comfort of a view from the stars

Gripping from the start... beautifully written, Shapiro explores time, memory and our human interconnectedness to create a tender, moving portrayal of the ripple effect one event and on person's actions can have on many lives

What a treat. I don't know of anyone who writes about family with the same generous understanding

Gripping, unexpected and beautiful

Wears its philosophical intentions on its sleeve; well-developed characters and their interesting careers seal the deal.

The wisdom and beauty in these seamlessly-braided narratives form a singular emotional experience for the reader that is both immediate and everlasting.

A beautiful exploration of the connections between two families and the reverberations from a teenager's lie...Shapiro imagines in luminous prose how each of the characters' lives might have gone if things had turned out differently...an intriguing meditation

Shapiro writes with compassion and a deep understanding of the damage that secrets wreak

Shapiro returns...with a beautiful exploration of the connections between two families and the reverberations from a teenager's lie... Shapiro imagines in luminous prose how each of the characters' lives might have gone if things had turned out differently. It's an intriguing meditation.

Shapiro delivers keen perceptions about family dynamics via fictional characters that exude a rare combination of substance and delicacy. Stunning in depth and breadth, this luminous examination of loss and acceptance, furtiveness and reliability, abandonment and friendship ultimately blazes with profound revelations

Signal Fires is an exquisite portrait of two families, and a testament to the human capacity to experience love and loss. With wry tenderness it shows how we are all connected through time in ways that are at once beautiful, mysterious, profound and full of hope.

Division Street is full of secrets. And one night in particular has been kept buried. 
 
'Lyrically examines the ways a single event can alter many lives for ever . . . wonderful' Good Housekeeping 
 
An impulsive lie – told with the best intentions – consumes the Wilf family. Even as they change and grow, each is haunted by what they choose to forget. Then the Shenkmans move in across the street: a couple with their own secrets and a lonely, brilliant son. 
 
As their stories collide in ways they never could have imagined, the past comes hurtling back to Division Street, setting in motion a spellbinding chain of events that will transform both families forever. 
 
A heart-stopping story about human connection, for fans of THE PAPER PALACE and LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE 
 
‘A fantastic writer’ Dolly Alderton 
‘Stunning’ Lisa Taddeo 
‘Tender and philosophical’ Hannah Beckerman, Observer 
 
* READERS LOVE SIGNAL FIRES * 
'Was both devastated and wowed at the end' 
'The best novel that I've read all year! I couldn't put it down' 
'Profoundly moving, deeply relatable and so beautifully written' 
'Gorgeous, deeply moving and captivating' 
'Beautiful, full of emotion and magic'

Family History

Elegantly written, wry and unsettling.

Shapiro has both a best-selling writer's instinct for plot and pacing and a fine literary sensibility... A powerful, penetrating illumination of the hidden agendas and consequences of family relationships

FAMILY HISTORY is virtually impossible to put down

Shapiro is an abundantly emotional writer with a deep understanding of life's banal blessings

Shapiro's suspenseful novel movingly explores the fragility of family life... the overall effect is to create a web that lures readers in, curious to find out who is guilty of what and whether the ending will be happy

This gripping narrative has the deeply felt emotional fidelity of a true story; it’s a book readers will finish in one sitting.

A brutal firecracker of a novel that chronicles the dissolution of a cinematically perfect New England Family

Real heart-in-your-throat scariness... the characters are so real and the situations so emotional that they leave the reader almost dizzy

One of those books most readers will finish in one sitting... because it is so intense you can't take a break. In gripping, moving prose, Shapiro reminds us of any family's essential fragility, but also of the tenacious strength of love

Shapiro writes wonderfully. . .she gently regulates the tone of the novel to reflect the tenuous nature of its central conflict

A gripping account of a contemporary Massachusetts family of four unraveling as problems with the eldest daughter start to rip the delicate fabric of love and partnership.

Shapiro’s small observations of motherhood are keen and astute; they demand empathy…realistic and heartbreaking

Are the parents always to blame? 
 
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. 
 
‘Riveting’ Harper's Bazaar 
‘Graceful’ Glamour 
‘A poised, absorbing book’ New York Times Book Review

Black & White

Shapiro does something rather thrilling with her story: she gets it just right.

Universal dilemmas face us all, and it is the novelist's job to breathe life into them one way or another, and this is something Shapiro does very well indeed

Shapiro's central characters are expertly rendered

Spellbinding...provocative, hypnotic...spot-on authentic. A cool depiction of a mother and daughter's fraught and fiery relationship

Uncompromising storytelling.... The ideas Shapiro grapples with resonate, and she raises trenchant and enduring questions that resist easy answers

Oprah’s Book Club readers or fans of Jodi Picoult will enjoy this psychologically gripping book

The novel offers some fine insights into marriage, the making of art and the often difficult mother-daughter dynamic

Shapiro portrays [this family] with compassion and humanity - nobody's really a villain, though all of her characters are flawed... Black & White is really about the shades of grey in human relationships

Enthralling, fast-paced and a great read.

[Shapiro] writes with an economy that draws the reader into the dramatic fray of the scenes

Searing . . . Shapiro forages a remarkably clear-eyed path through the issues at hand

Thought-provoking . . . Black & White explores the web of family, obligation, and trust. And reveals life’s shades of gray

Mothers and daughters is a naturally absorbing subject and in Black & White, Shapiro shapes an intriguing dilemma that heightens into a moving story

The extraordinary Dani Shapiro (Family History and Slow Motion) pushes mother-daughter boundaries to the limit in a blistering novel about art and ambition

Clara’s mother is famous for the nude portraits she took of Clara throughout her childhood. 
 
Clara has spent her entire adult life pulling away from her mother. 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 her mother 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. 
 
‘Spellbinding...provocative, hypnotic’ USA Today 
‘Uncompromising storytelling’ Los Angeles Times 
‘Ambitious…thrilling’ TimeOut New York

Dani Shapiro

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

A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro’s] 20-year journey as an author and teacher

Writers need hope. Writers need help. Thank you, Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro has written a wise, pragmatic, and soulful field guide to the writing life. Still Writing is filled with honest words to not only live by but write toward. Shapiro has created a well-drawn map for the lost, the weary, and the found. I loved it

Honest and conversational, Shapiro provides an introspective look into the creative process and the value of persistence, offering insight to writers at any level

Intimate, honest, clear-eyed, and grounded

One of those rare books that is both beautiful and useful. Still Writing is an exploration of the writing life, lit up by Shapiro’s luminous voice

Her guidance is sound, and her imagery can be transporting

The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

‘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 Egan 
 
From 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.

Dani Shapiro

Praise for Still Writing

A paean to discipline and solitude

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 write ...

A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro’s] 20-year journey as an author and teacher

A paean to discipline and solitude

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 write ...

A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro’s] 20-year journey as an author and teacher

A paean to discipline and solitude

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 write ...

A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro’s] 20-year journey as an author and teacher

Books by Dani Shapiro

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