The Bright Years

"This novel sparkles in its sentences, its texture, its big heart--THE BRIGHT YEARS is a vivid, forthright, and gorgeously written story of love in its many iterations." --CLAIRE LOMBARDO, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same as it Ever Was

"To attempt to tell a convincing love story at this late stage in the history of the novel is to set the bar ambitiously high, and yet Sarah Damoff somehow pulls it off twice in a single book, penning two thoroughly persuasive, interrelated relationship histories, each with appealing texture and depth, one believable because of the pain it captures, the other a balm in the hope it implies. THE BRIGHT YEARS builds symphonically, polyphonically, reaching emotional crescendos and gliding into perfectly calibrated decrescendos that mimic the rhythms of real life. In its nuanced understanding of the psyche and its unsparing realism about human limitations even in the face of our desperate attempts to overcome them, this book, when it opens its sails to gale-force winds of feeling, leads one to shed one's sophistication and openly root for love, to cheer for it, even shed a tear for it, as Damoff sticks the landing and at long last it comes."--MATTHEW THOMAS, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

"In THE BRIGHT YEARS, Sarah Damoff paints a loving portrait of a Texas family shadowed by the power of addiction. The journeys of Lillian, Jet and Ryan Bright are in all ways tender, tragic and triumphant and left me rooting for each character until the very end. A beautiful debut."--AMANDA CHURCHILL, author of The Turtle House