About this item
Set in France and America, News of Our Loved Ones is a haunting and intimate examination of love and loss, beauty and the cost of survival, witnessed through two generations of one French family, whose lives are all touched by the tragic events surrounding the D-Day bombings in Normandy.What if your family's fate could be traced back to one indelible summerOver four long years, the Delasalle family has struggled to live in their Nazi occupied village in Normandy. Maman, Oncle Henri, Yvonne, and Franoise silently watched as their Jewish neighbors were arrested or wordlessly disappeared. Now in June 1944, when the sirens wail each day, warning of approaching bombers, the family wonders if rumors of the coming Allied invasion are true - and if they will survive to see their country liberated.
About the Author
Born in North Carolina in 1959, Abigail DeWitt is a dual citizen of France and the United States, and the daughter of two theoretical physicists. She grew up partly in the Alps, where her mother ran an institute for physicists, and partly in North Carolina, Texas, and California. Drawing on family stories--in particular, her mother's experiences in WWII--she frequently writes about war, immigration, and survival, seeking the small, often paradoxical moments in the midst of major historical events. Described as "engrossing and ambitious" by the NY Times Book Review, her fiction has received awards from the James A. Michener Society, the McColl Center for the Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center at Annaghmakerrig, Ireland, the North Carolina Arts Council, and elsewhere.Educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she's the author of three novels, LILI, DOGS, and NEWS OF OUR LOVED ONES, as well as short stories and essays which have appeared in Narrative, LitHub, the LA Review of Books, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Five Points, Witness, and many other publications.Her day jobs have included teaching French and creative writing, working as a janitor, waitressing, housecleaning, and, most recently, helping to develop a writing program for women veterans.