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A Family Story
by Julia Blackburn
This is the moving story of three people: acclaimed writer Julia Blackburn; her father, Thomas—a poet and alcoholic with an addiction to barbiturates; and her mother, Rosalie—a flirtatious painter with no boundaries.
After Julia's parents divorced, her mother took in male lodgers with the hope they would become her lovers. When one of the lodgers began an affair with Julia, competitive Rosalie was devastated; he later committed suicide, shattering whatever relationship between mother and daughter remained. After thirty years, Rosalie, diagnosed with leukemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life. Only then were they allowed, at long last, to exist with an ease they had never known.
"Striking... . Colored by passion and memory... . [Blackburn] artfully smudges the line between memoir and reportage." —Harper's
"Masterly... .A stunning book, part memoir, part portrait of [Blackburn's] parents' generation... . Rawly human, bleakly funny, and insightful." —O, The Oprah Magazine
"Searing, shocking, unflinching... . [Blackburn's] considerable literary output attests both to her talent for imaginative observation and to her remarkable knack for survival." —The New York Times Book Review
This information about The Three of Us 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.
Julia Blackburn is the author of seven books of nonfiction, including Old Man Goya, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and With Billie, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; and of the novels The Book of Color and The Leper's Companions, both of which were short-listed for the Orange Prize. She lives in England.
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by Ann Napolitano
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a poignant and engrossing family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?
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