My New Novel on Kindle

This is a project I've believed in. It's a story I have loved, with characters that I grew to know over many years. It is the first of my novels to come completely from my imagination. In other words, its characters and plot don't in any way come from people or situations I've known from my own living. The themes, though, I have known. The silences of many midwestern men, I have known. The way life can make women harden and then break down the center -- that I've known, too. I know about running away when you just can't live another moment where you're standing. You'll be crushed, you think. You'll implode. You can't see any way out, and so if a crack appears, an aperture, the slightest opening, you'll rush towards it before it closes again. Just maybe, you think, there will be freedom on the other side, but there hardly ever is.

We suffer affliction; we forgive; we are forgiven--if not by one another, then by Life itself. The question always is: can we open to it? All of it? This story doesn't shy away from evil. These people know evil both subtle and obvious. They grapple with it. We wonder where the grace might be, from where the strength and light and faith might come to rise above or to embrace what is the perfect affliction for any given soul. It can break our hearts. It can reduce us to bone.

I suspect I wrote this novel to teach myself not to run away from what is most real in my life, but rather to face it, embrace it, learn from it, and be transformed. Over the years of visions and revisions (as the poet says) I've come to understand the challenge put to each of its characters. Their challenges reflect my own, as they might also reflect yours.

Author, Beryl Singleton Bissell writes after reading the book:  

The lyric beauty of Lore Weber’s writing transforms a disquieting story of abandonment and loss into one that shimmers with hope. A complex saga of several generations of women from four different families, the narrative peaks around the life of one young girl, Hannah, whose courage uncovers the mystery that binds these lives together. An amazing novel from a writer whose stories gift us all. – Beryl Singleton Bissell, author of The Scent of God and A View of the Lake.

GYPSY BONES has been published to the Kindle Store and is already available* for readers to purchase here.