The wonderful women at Belletrist featured me and The Light We Lost in their brief today! Thank you, Emma & Karah.
(In my brief, I talk about how much I loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and how much I can’t wait to read Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion)
I’m too excited for words, so just going to leave this Deadline article here.
I’m so, so honored that Reese Witherspoon chose The Light We Lost as her February Book Club Pick for Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine. What a Tuesday morning it was when I saw this video!
February Book Announcement: The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo
"Our February pick is all about the different kinds of Love – the kind that engulfs you like a wildfire and the kind that keeps you warm like a hearth fire. This love story between Lucy & Gabe spans decades and continents as two star-crossed lovers try to return to each other. Life, motherhood, and distance get in the way. Will they ever meet again? This book kept me up at night, turning the pages to find out, and the ending did not disappoint." – Reese Witherspoon #rbcxhs #thelightwelost by Jill Santopolo, Author
Posted by Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine on Tuesday, February 6, 2018
To celebrate World Read Aloud Day, I read the first page of The Light We Lost out loud. If you click below, you can hear it. (You can also hear me as the narrator on the audiobook.)
Found out that today is #WorldReadAloudDay, so I decided to celebrate by reading the first page of #TheLightWeLost aloud!
Posted by Jill Santopolo, Author on Thursday, February 1, 2018
I met the translator who translated The Light We Lost into Hebrew on Twitter when she shared this cover. So cool to see it. (And to electronically meet her!)
Thank you to Book Bub for including The Light We Lost in their list of the most heartbreaking books of 2017.
The Estonian edition of The Light We Lost arrived, and I think that kiss is looking pretty sexy…
What a lovely present — a beautiful pile of The Light We Lost UK paperbacks from HQ Stories!
I spy The Light We Lost on the Anthropologie Blog!
Click here to see the full list picked by Belletrist Book Club.
I celebrated the holiday season with The Light We Lost.
Here is a little celebratory excerpt from The Light We Lost, in which Lucy and Darren spend their first Christmas together:
Darren was so excited about this holiday trip. He made list upon list to be sure we wouldn’t forget anything, and after he checked and double-checked our suitcases, he declared us all set to leave the day before Christmas. Then he got the flu.
“I’m sorry for ruining your Christmas,” he said.
I kissed his feverish forehead and said, “As long as I get to spend it with you, it’s not ruined.”
He took some medication and went back to sleep, and I snuck out of the apartment again. I bought a three-foot-tall tree—the biggest I could carry on my own—and lights and tinsel and glitter snowflakes that had already been marked twenty percent off at Duane Reade. I got a box of red and gold ornaments, too, and a ballerina for the top of the tree, because everything else had been sold out. Then, while Darren slept, I turned his living room into Christmas. I even unpacked our gifts for his whole family and put them under the tree, which I’d balanced on the coffee table, to make it look taller. It felt like I was giving him back some of the happiness that he’d given to me over the past year.
“Lucy?” Darren called from the bedroom, just as I was sticking the last sparkly snowflake to the wall behind the couch.
“Are you moving furniture?”
I heard him padding slowly to the door, coughing as he walked, and then the bedroom door opened, and he was there, leaning against the doorframe, pale and rumpled, with dark circles under his eyes. He looked at the living room and didn’t say a word.
“Darren? Is this okay? I wanted to make sure that being sick didn’t mean you missed Christmas.”
I took a step closer to him and saw tears in his eyes. “Lucy,” he said, and started to cough. “Sometimes I love you so much that I don’t even know how my heart can stand it.”
I walked over to him and hugged him, harder than I ever had, as if I somehow needed to show him how much I loved him with the strength of that hug. Darren was my Old Nassau experiment. The longer we were together, the more I loved him, and the better it got.
Thank you to Bookish for choosing my essay as one of their Best Author Essays of 2017.
I love seeing new translations of The Light We Lost. Here is the Swedish edition!